Literature is often thought of as a kind of frill, what sedentary people might turn to after an honest day's toil, an extra. High claims have sometimes been made for it, but the claims can be suspect. To know the right literature is to be invested with the authority of the right class. You know it's literature if it's difficult, but makes you feel superior because you can tackle it.
Literature does a person good.
Discovering the Ancient World I personally do believe that literature is a good thing, but this belief seems to me a kind of faith, and ultimately probably at least partly irrational, as pleasure is. Literature is a result of writing, which some have lamented as imposing a representational barrier between the human being and reality. Literature is ultimately a result of language. Perhaps literature comes to exist as a concept in our consciousness only after we have developed a religious consciousness. Perhaps it is always secondary, at best.