The meaning of this course
It may help you to tofeel the pure satisfaction which an inspired and precise work of art gives; and this sense of satisfaction in its turn goes to build up a sense of more mentalcomfort, the kind of comfort one feels when one realizes that for all itsblunders and boners the inner texture of life is also a matter of inspiration and precision.
The purpose of this course
I try to make of you good readers whoread books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations.
I try to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, theirart.
I try to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author—the joys and difficulties of creation.
We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter.
In one word, to read for an “aesthetic bliss” and to experience that tingle in any department of thought and emotion.
We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we donot learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are inorder to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.