Does Literature Help Us Live?

 Tim Parks's essay in the New York Review of Books, "Does Literature Help Us Live?," rang true for me and made me cry...until the last two paragraphs, when Parks seems to take a cynical turn that is the complete opposite of what he'd written. Nevertheless, well worth the read, particularly in his references to Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. 

Sample:

"at the core of the literary experience, as it is generally construed and promoted, is the pathos of this unequal battle and of a self inevitably saddened—though perhaps galvanized, too, or, in any event, tempered and hardened—by the systematic betrayal of youth’s great expectations. Life promises so much, but then slips through one’s fingers."