The Hedonism of Reading Good Books
It's a pleasure that infuses life with richness and it's available for the price of a library card.
Books like Burke’s could provide, in other words, the pleasure of a good and rigorous argument, one not divorced from rhetorical niceties that could be revered even if they outstripped his ability to imitate them.
What Hazlitt is really driving at, it seems to me, is the obligation of the thinking individual to form a personal canon of favorite authors and texts. Just as we differ as individuals, our personal canons will differ. But we should all nevertheless have one, and not take anyone else’s word for it. It is to be made, not borrowed. The reasons given are frankly somewhat epicurean: the pleasure of time well spent; the pleasure of memory; the pleasure of watching a master at work—and it bears repeating that we should include some masters whose ideas we do not like.
But this hedonism, such as it is, makes its mark on the meaning of a life, infusing it with a richness that can be had at no dearer a price than that of a library card, which is to say, it can be had for free by anyone who is not so foolish as to fail to go after it. As Hazlitt says, “To have lived in the cultivation of an intimacy with such works, and to have familiarly relished such names, is not to have lived quite in vain.”
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