On Substack, you can get the sense that not having read a classic — say, Middlemarch or Moby Dick — is a moral failure. “Just read them.” “It’s not that hard.” “Don’t die without having read Moby Dick!”

It's true, but are we forgetting that the average American works over 40 hours a week? The 40+ hours I work each week just happen to involve literary work. But what about the parents, the long-distance commuters, the front-line workers, the retailers, small business owners, and all those for whom leisure is unevenly distributed?

Our task as readers in the 21st century is to recognize how rare and fragile the conditions for sustained reading really are. We must promote a culture that accommodates and supports time for the study of literature. We also must resist the expectation that reading must justify itself through mastery or display.

Faced with the long arc of art and the short span of life, the most appropriate response is gratitude for what we can read, patience for what we cannot, and admiration for those readers whose circumstances make reading itself a courageous act of resistance.