'I Read Books for the Aesthetic Emotions'

“Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.”

A reader asks how I decide what to read next. With time, it’s gotten easier. A book read isn’t scratched off some master list of required reading (there is no such thing) unless it’s lousy. A book read and enjoyed is often added to the potential to-be-reread list. Most of my reading today is rereading. For the first two and a half months of the lockdown I had no access to my customary university and public libraries. I bought a few books online but mostly I relied on my personal library. I was never at a loss. I own most of the books that are most important to me.

In case you haven’t already guessed, the passage quoted at the top is from Seven Nights (trans. Eliot Weinberger, rev. ed. 2009), seven lectures delivered by Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in 1977. I like the phrase “aesthetic emotions,” one I would have misunderstood when young. It would have sounded Pater-esque, faintly decadent and stinking of l’art pour l’art. Note Borges’ plural: “emotions.” Sometimes it’s the elegant musical lilt of a phrase, but it might be a forcefully phrased thought or a nuanced moral revelation. For the attentive reader, literature is dense with aesthetic emotions. Borges in Seven Nights again:   

  

“When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for we change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus.”