There Is A God, And His Name

... One Doesn't Want To Read Badly Any More Than Live Badly, Since Time Will Not Relent. I Don't Know That We Owe God Or Nature A Death, But Nature Will Collect Anyway, And We Certainly Owe Mediocrity Nothing, Whatever Collectivity It Purports To Advance Or At Least Represent.

The True Use Of Shakespeare Or Of Cervantes, Of Homer Or Of Dante, Of Chaucer Or Of Rabelais, Is To Augment One's Own Growing Inner Self. . . . The Mind's Dialogue With Itself Is Not Primarily A Social Reality. All That The Western Canon Can Bring One Is The Proper Use Of One's Own Solitude, That Solitude Whose Final Form Is One's Confrontation With One's Own Mortality.

I Have Read All Of Daniel Aaron's Books, And Admired Them, But In The Americanist I Believe He Has Composed An Intellectual And Social Memoir For Which He Will Be Remembered. His Self-portrait Is Marked By Personal Tact And Admirable Restraint: He Is And Is Not Its Subject. The Americanist Is A Vision Of Otherness: Literary And Academic Friends And Acquaintances, Here And Abroad. Eloquently Phrased And Free Of Nostalgia, It Catches A Lost World That Yet Engendered Much Of Our Own.

In The Finest Critics One Hears The Full Cry Of The Human. They Tell One Why It Matters To Read.

We Read Deeply For Varied Reasons, Most Of Them Familiar: That We Cannot Know Enough People Profoundly Enough; That We Need To Know Ourselves Better; That We Require Knowledge, Not Just Of Self And Others, But Of The Way Things Are. Yet The Strongest, Most Authentic Motive For Deep Reading…is The Search For A Difficult Pleasure.