Literature ultimately helps one to ground a deeper and wider outlook. An over-directed life without the inner resource to step outside of itself is closed to other beauties and the complexities of character and world.

What we lack is a basic willingness to see literature as providing some kind of necessary foundation. Our society still expects schools to prepare their charges for work only and not for life. As such, literature is construed as at best technically useless and random, at worst socially disruptive.