Why readers read

I finished An Experiment in Criticism today.  As usual, C.S. Lewis ended his book in a state of very quotable elegance.  Here he's talking about why good readers read--because literature enlarges the soul. For one not familiar with Lewis, it might almost sound like he's being snobbish, but please don't take it that way.  I really don't know any other way he could have said what follows and still get his point across:

"Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world.  In it, we should be suffocated...

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.  There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege.  In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality.  But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.  Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."  

Enough said.