A Hard Book to Read: When Discomfort Helps

You pick up a hard book, read the same page three times, and the conclusion arrives on its own: this isn't for me, I don't have the head for it. The feeling is familiar to anyone who reads seriously, and almost no one mentions what Plato does, in the story of the cave itself: every time the prisoner moves forward, the text describes pain. The discomfort of a hard book may therefore be a description of the process, not a sign that you took the wrong door.

What hurts in the cave

Reread the climb with one detail in mind. Plato does not tell a story of gentle liberation. The freed prisoner, forced to stand up, turn his neck, and look at the light, suffers: his eyes hurt, the glare dazzles him (515c-e). Dragged up the harsh, steep climb, he suffers and grows angry, and when he reaches the outside, the sun blinds him, and he cannot see anything of what he is now told is real (515e-516a).

No step is pleasant. More than that, Plato records the temptation that comes with the pain. Forced to face the light, the prisoner would turn back to what he can see easily, and would judge that clearer than what he is shown (515e). Anyone who has put down a hard book to return to a light text knows the movement: what is understood without effort seems more true, simply because it is within reach.

Difficulty describes the process

The source lesson reads this detail as a key to one's own discomfort. The prisoner, on coming out, struggles to open his eyes, to get used to the light, even to recognize trees, animals, the sun. Compare this with your own formation: we run into barriers, a subject, a course, books we read and cannot grasp. It is not easy to sit down, give hours and sweat to understand something. It is part of the process.

The key word here is process. To reach a result, there is a starting point, and the result is the consequence of a path. Plato, in the lesson's reading, does not say that difficulty proves you are learning. He says it is part of the description of how someone is turned, and that changes how discomfort should be read: the question stops being what is wrong with me and becomes where I am on the path.

Why the automatic conclusion is often wrong

The problem is that the difficulty of someone being turned looks very much like that of someone who is not cut out for it. Both appear as dry pages, paragraphs that won't land, the feeling of reading without taking anything in. From the inside, it is impossible to tell one from the other, and that is why the automatic conclusion tends to be the most pessimistic.

The lesson adds two things that help you doubt that conclusion. First, no one chose the starting point: we may have had bad experiences in education, perhaps without good teachers, perhaps not even at home, and that weighs on today's discomfort without being an inability. Second, the process of building culture is hard and requires time, patience, and a certain discomfort to break through the filters we use to judge reality. In other words, the difficulty is not a factory defect in you.

A path in stages

Plato also shows that the climb does not require you to face the sun all at once. The prisoner needs time and begins with what is easiest to see: first the shadows, then the reflections in water, then the things themselves, and only at the end what is in the sky, and the sun (516a-b). Each stage prepares him for the next.

This fits the criterion the lesson draws from Plato's curriculum: what educates is what resists, and a text that does not challenge you only entertains you. So a hard book, when it is a good one, is precisely the kind of reading that does the work. And so it is useful to choose texts that challenge you, and conversations that challenge you, not only those that confirm what you already know.

Badly written books exist too

None of this turns every discomfort into a virtue, and it is worth saying clearly so we do not give Plato more than he gave. Badly written books exist, bad translations exist, and giving up on one of them can simply be good sense. Plato does not claim otherwise: he describes the discomfort of someone being turned, and does not prove that all discomfort is of that kind. Within that caveat, what the text offers is a criterion for reading your own pain. Before concluding that the problem is you, it is worth asking whether the book is one of those that resist because they have something to show, and whether you are simply in the stretch of the climb that is hard for everyone.

Company on the climb

There is one more resource the lesson recommends without hedging: reading with other people. Having someone to read with and exchange ideas with helps you listen to others' reflections, and formation, the teacher says, is not a path we walk alone. That is why the lesson ends with a question for viewers: what is the book you started, found hard, and dropped? The question is not an accusation. It assumes that some difficult books keep turning up on the lists of people who gave up, and that there are good reasons they are always the same ones.

If one of them is on your shelf, Plato's image serves as a reminder. You may be exactly at the point where your eyes hurt, the climb is harsh, and the temptation is to go back to the shadows that make sense at first glance. The text does not promise that getting through it will be comfortable. It only promises that this is the description of the path, and not proof that you were never meant for it.

Everything attributed to Plato in this article is paraphrase, using Stephanus numbering and the reference edition of The Republic by Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation).

Continue: Does Reading Many Books Help? What Plato Would Say · Plato on Education: After the Allegory of the Cave · Can I understand philosophy without a degree? · Who was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Source lesson: O Mito da Caverna explicado: a educação segundo Platão