'Take His Experience Along With Him'

We shouldn’t be surprised that bookish tastes change across time. They mature, just as some of us do. The books we choose to read and reread follow a path parallel to our experience and maturity. This isn’t to imply “progress.” It’s not as though all of us shed bad taste and move irrevocably toward good taste. Our needs change as we get older. What once amused and nourished us no longer does. Conversely, a few books remain prized across a lifetime. 

A reader tells me he’s offended that I no longer read Hart Crane. He suggests I might be doing this because Crane was gay. That’s a cheap and ridiculous accusation. Why do I continue reading Cavafy, Proust and Auden? Crane is not a “bad” poet. He is no longer a poet for me. Plenty of others read him for admirable and silly reasons. He is their writer and no longer mine. No one can dictate what gives us pleasure and sustenance.

 

I think of the writers who didn’t much interest me when I was thirty, though I thought of myself as a pretty sophisticated reader – among them, Louis MacNeice, Walter de la Mare, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Elizabeth Bowen, Max Beerbohm, Henry Green. All are now in regular rotation. Who did I read passionately when young but can no longer abide? Kafka, James T. Farrell, Hemingway, Pound, Dreiser. Just listing these writers feels like an oblique form of autobiography, a mingling of nostalgia and regret. William Hazlitt writes in “On Reading Old Books”:

 

“A sage philosopher, who was not a very wise man, said, that he should like very well to be young again, if he could take his experience along with him. This ingenious person did not seem to be aware, by the gravity of his remark, that the great advantage of being young is to be without this weight of experience, which he would fain place upon the shoulders of youth, and which never comes too late with years.”