When I taught literature, I had to frequently remind my students not to skip the “boring parts” of the books—things like long paragraphs describing scenery in Dickens’ Oliver Twist or the long list of ships that appears near the beginning of The Iliad. I understand the temptation. When I was their age, I frequently skimmed such passages, too. Who has time for all this stuff about rocks and trees? I thought. Let’s get on with the action.

But as the years passed, and as I learned from much wiser lovers of literature than myself, something changed inside me. I came to cherish the slow, stately passages, the parts where “nothing happens,” but where, truly, the world and its mystery are made present in one of the deepest ways possible.

“The boring parts” of books are there for their own sake, not for the sake of plot. For that reason, we ought to pay more attention to them, not less. The boring parts are generally an imitation of some aspect of the world that the writer finds inexplicably mysterious and wonderful, like a shady grove of trees, a child’s steadfast gaze, or a woman’s face. Passages about such things are not “filler”—they are the soul of literature. In them, the writer (and the reader, if he is willing) luxuriate in the joy and surprise of being—of what is—because being is good. Those passages are a celebration of the universe.

Poetic passages somehow express inexpressible things that we know intuitively to be true about rocks, trees, wind, and human faces. And in so doing, they train us to cultivate a deeper, contemplative gaze on the “boring parts” of our own everyday lives as well.

Consider with me a landscape description from Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia:

We drifted along lazily, very happy, through the magical light of the late afternoon.

All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death—heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

There is no “action” in this paragraph, yet it is simply glorious, a pure joy to read. It is food for the soul. It opens the soul to beauty we might otherwise have missed. And it is truth—Cather articulates something about the mystery of fall and prairies and cornfields that we have felt but been unable, perhaps, to put into words. This is her gift to us.

Great works of literature contain hundreds if not thousands of such little passages, little jewels, that we might be tempted at first glance to skip. But if we do so, we are missing the whole point of the book. It is passages like these that, in some sense, give meaning to all the rest. For the drama of human actions plays out against the backdrop of the mystery of being, and is really only understandable as such.

Or consider this passage from the classic children’s novel The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame:

Leaving the water-side, where rushes stood thick and tall in a stream that was becoming sluggish and low, he wandered country-wards, crossed a field or two of pasturage already looking dusty and parched, and thrust into the great sea of wheat, yellow, wavy, and murmurous, full of quiet motion and small whisperings. Here he often loved to wander, through the forest of stiff strong stalks that carried their own golden sky away over his head—a sky that was always dancing, shimmering, softly talking; or swaying strongly to the passing wind and recovering itself with a toss and a merry laugh.

Words like these fill us with an unnamable longing—a longing to be like the Water Rat, free to wander through the fields of waving wheat under a golden sky endlessly. Here, the Water Rat is a cozy character of a children’s book; yet, at the same time, he is somehow the Pilgrim Soul. I do not mean to imply that the Grahame was writing some kind of intentional metaphor here. Rather, I suggest that in capturing the waving wheat and dancing sky and the lonely figure passing through it, Grahame has touched something universal that finds an ultimate expression in the journey of life.

Not long ago, I wrote about our declining attention spans and the danger such distractibility presents, not only for our work lives, but also for the development of our human nature, at the core of which, as Aristotle said, is the desire to know. One such symptom of our chronic inattentiveness is this dislike for long, verdant descriptions in literature. Contemporary literature, as a rule, contains a lot fewer such passages than the literature of the past does. We want action. Dialogue. Flash. Bang. Pop. We read for plot, not for reverie. In our rather pragmatic mindset, a book is there simply to tell an entertaining story, and whatever poetic language or rich descriptions appear are, at best, decorations, and, at worst, annoying fluff.

But this is not how our forebears thought about literature. Of course, literature has always been about telling a good story. But it’s about more than just that. It’s about capturing the joys and griefs, the mystery and wonder, the poignant tragedy of the human estate and the astonishing majesty of the world in which that drama plays out. Thus the “important stuff” of literature isn’t just the plot points any more than “the important stuff” of our own lives consists solely of pragmatic actions, of “getting things done.”

On the contrary, I would hazard to guess that, for most of us, the most important moments of our lives are some of the least practical. The gardens of our lives are rich and varied, made up of a great variety of experiences, subtle and delicate, bold and dramatic, a mixture of action, reaction, reflection, passion.

A book that focuses on action alone may serve some entertainment purpose, but it is not literature in the proper sense if it does not reflect the depth of human life, some of the most defining moments of which center around the little things, not the big ones. All great literature teaches us, in some sense, not to despise “the little things.” Or—to put it more accurately—it teaches us that nothing is truly little.

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