In a dark, dank prison, a man is writing, intent on the scroll in front of him. He is unsure if he will live to finish this work, but he hopes he will. He still has much more to say. Sometimes he wonders, Will anyone read it? Or will this work, the greatest of his life, be heartlessly fed to the fire after his death? And if readers find it, what will they think of it?
But there is no time to waste on these questions, the unknowns. He rushes ahead, eager to get ideas down on the fragile scroll before he forgets, or before they come for him, as they so surely will one day soon.
In AD 423, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was imprisoned on a charge of treason and executed the following year. We best remember him today not for the injustice he suffered but for what he accomplished during his imprisonment. Awaiting his death, Boethius composed a stunning work that has received well-deserved and renewed attention of late: The Consolation of Philosophy.
The story of how Boethius wrote this unusual book of dialogue with Lady Philosophy is also the story of one glaring absence: library access for the author. You can’t tell it while reading his work, but once you see it, you can’t unsee.
How can a man write an entire book like this, quoting poetry, summarizing ideas, covering the Greco-Roman canon so thoroughly and precisely, all from memory? This case is a strong testimony to the existence of an extraordinarily well-stocked library housed in the author’s mind.
We all possess our own distinctive “libraries of the mind,” literary scholar William Marx argues in his new book by this title. Each of us owns an invisible library that keeps growing over the course of a lifetime, shaping us into the people we become.
It is a rather chaotic process, of course, completed in stages. Lifelong readers begin stocking their inner library from a young age. From the first book someone ever read to you as an infant, the construction project of your inner library began.
In these early years, perhaps the library was stocked with simple classics. Inevitably, some of these earliest books eventually became forced into a sort of mental backroom storage in your mind, where they now dwell in the subconscious.
My six-year-old daughter recently came across Are You My Mother? and had no recollection of us ever reading it to her, even as the book still bears distinctive marks of toddler-chewing on the cover. But then, upon re-reading, the sweet tale of the bird and the Scary Snort who helped it get back in the nest came flooding back.
The library of the mind is no static, fixed entity. It keeps expanding as long as you keep reading—and gets cobwebby with neglect. It’s not just the stories or plots of certain books that shape the reader but also poignant turns of phrase. Entire short poems or snippets stick in our mind for the long haul, and mental images take shape when reading, jumping off the page and into our lives. I often find particular Bible verses or hymns coming to mind in a given situation.
For Boethius, it was these books, the fruit of a lifetime of reading, that gave him the imagination and the beautiful words that comforted him in prison. Consolation of Philosophy is, at its heart, the story of the consolation that books will grace lifelong readers with in their moments of deepest distress.
I have recently begun the position of interim director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Ashland University. I find myself asking, How might I encourage the next generation of Christian creative writers? As of this August, it is my job to seek good answers to this question.
The program has not previously had a distinctive focus, and enrollment has dwindled to the low single digits. I am now rebuilding the program with a new focus on training creative writers for the public good and for the good of the church. And I keep returning to the Boethian answer to the question of what is essential for this program.
Really, every single one of us must read more, and this is especially true for creatives. We must read more than we write. For those coming into the MFA, everything must begin with cultivating a personal library of the mind and the soul. From what fount will the writing flow, otherwise?
I worry that for too many writers today, creativity comes from within. You are your own muse and rescuer, ready to resolve any difficulty in your life or writing (and the two surely overlap and inform each other) with just the right degree of caffeine and medicinal cheesecake or chocolate. All writing becomes, by default, memoir—the grittier the better. The model of Boethius provides a different model: Good writing flows from a lifetime of good reading.
The modern view of creativity as coming from within rather than from the riches of earlier tradition is not unique to writers. As trust in institutions is at an all-time low, tradition and authority have become dirty words, and the circle of acceptable influences has shrunk.
Taken to its logical conclusions, reading becomes unnecessary if inspiration is found chiefly within the writer. But the results are not only narcissistic, they are also remarkably boring and unoriginal. In contrast, think of every great writer you have ever read. I guarantee that every single one of them has been a voracious reader.
Indeed, while I am beginning student recruitment for the program, I must admit that some of the best writers historically did not hold an MFA or receive any sort of training in writing. After all, a degree specifically in creative writing is a fairly recent concept. Instead, the best writers have always been prolific readers.
Consider Abraham Lincoln. With less than a year of formal schooling, he was an autodidact, simply reading and learning on his own—reading his way successfully into a career in law. As we read any of his writings now, such as the famous Gettysburg Address, we have to admit that he had a way with words. But his gift did not come from within. Lincoln’s writings are suffused, in particular, with biblical language, because his library of the mind was steeped in the imagery of the Bible.
More recently, consider the classic example of the Inklings. Though most of them were academics by training, we do not know them for their scholarly publications. Instead, the incredible library of the mind that each had accumulated from a life spent immersed in classical and medieval literature, philology and linguistics, the Bible, philosophy, and theology yielded the fruit of works that now undergird our contemporary understanding of Christian storytelling. Their inspiration was in the Boethian mode—one that I would now like to bottle and spritz on aspiring poets, novelists, and essayists!
The source of Boethian creativity takes years—decades, really. Our reading life, after all, is cumulative. C. S. Lewis had accumulated a rich library of the mind because he had been reading mythology, literature, and everything else he could get his hands on since childhood.
But what about prospective writers who have not grown up around books, only to discover a love for poetry in high school or college? Not everyone begins in the same place. But one must begin somewhere, sometime, someplace. Why not now?
Read words that will make you stop whatever else you had thought of doing to stay with the book. It might be the sort of book or essay or poem you cannot set down until you have finished it.
Or it might be one that makes you stop mid-paragraph. Then, settled into a reverie, you experience that out-of-body experience that only graces quiet readers—the delight of the words gently seeping into your very bones.
Nadya Williams is books editor for Mere Orthodoxy and author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (2023); Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic (2024); and Christians Reading Classics (2025). Find her on Substack at Cultural Christians in the Early Church.
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