My post last week, In search of literary thrills past, generated some interesting comments. BradyDale suggested that books that thrilled us once "often don't stand up to the test of time." But Meg said that "books read in your youth shouldn't stand the test of time. If they do, you haven't grown."
I have been thinking about this and I wonder if it's just that certain experiences, including reading experiences, are so uniquely intense, due to time, place, and circumstance, that you just can't hope to repeat them. No kiss, however passionate, is ever like the first kiss.Yet we have a tendency to want to experience things again, to have a thrill long past once more, if only for a moment. And it can't be done. We must move on.
I still intend to reread Alain-Fournier'sThe Wanderer during the week I plan to take off in October -- the week of my next birthday. That's what journalists are for.
Not all books lose out to time, as Mary says, but the experience is always different. You get different things and enjoy it at a different level. THAT'S what tells you you've "grown" (or at least changed).
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ReplyDeletehmmm... I'm guessing you don't like Twain's "The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper." I loved Last of the Mohicans when I was younger, but I could never read it again after reading that essay.
ReplyDeleteWade,
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you wrote. I don't think Twain intended that piece to be something like a list of rules that future authors should live by. It was probably just a way to rip on an author he did not like.
The reason why I posted was that I wanted to hear a fan of Cooper's, and Deerslayer in particular, respond to the "Literary Offences," since I never had the opportunity to do so, and when I saw George’s post I thought this would be an opportunity to do that.
I liked Twain's essay so much because at the time I was reading Turgenev’s "Sketches from a Hunter’s Album” and all of the Maxim Gorky short stories I could get my hands on, and it seemed the more I got into stories of that nature the less I was interested in stories like Cooper’s. That being said, I never lost respect for stories that seem, at least on the surface, less “realistic” because it is ultimately a subjective choice, and my taste in literature could easily change again.