'Take Books Leisurely, Like a Soaking Rain'

“Happy the man who can take books leisurely, like a soaking rain, and not inquire too curiously for the amount of fertilizer they contain. It takes robust and staying power to get adequate pleasure out of even the greatness of the past. It takes other and richer gifts to find all the good there is in the second rate. But I fear that I drool – farewell.”

Of course you should read Proust. You tell me you’ve already read Balzac, George Eliot, Tolstoy, James. You have a taste for good fiction. You understand its demands and rewards. Pay no attention to those who lament the length of Proust’s book. It’s no longer than it needs to be. Don’t worry about “endurance.” Calibrate your rhythms to his. Proust is a first-rate host, ever thoughtful and gracious. He will make you feel at home and even make you laugh.  

The passage at the top is from the two-volume Holmes-Laski Letters, edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe and published by Harvard University Press in 1953. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is writing to Harold Laski on Sept. 29, 1929. Holmes was then eighty-eight; Laski, thirty-six. Reading it quickly I misunderstood the reference to “fertilizer.” I took that at first to mean manure – in the vernacular, bullshit. He means a book’s pedagogical content, its broccoli quotient: Is it good for you? That’s no way to gauge a book’s worth. Rather, does it give you pleasure? Earlier in the letter collection, Holmes describes his mixed reaction to Proust, saying he is “out jamesing H. James in his rotation of nuances.” For some of us, that’s a positive quality.