Kazin's Journals

“…I always thought of literature as the prime form of education, and that the content of the great books seemed to me as a matter of course the direct content of life….It was not so much the great books, or the supposed masterpieces, but what went on between writer and reader as a form of transmission that somehow had in it the possibility of human regeneration, of action toward some resolution of the eternal problems of life. To read was, comic as it may seem, to engage in a virtuous action, to be in touch with minds so much more experienced and better trained and gifted than yourself. AFTER ALL, READING PLATO WAS LISTENING TO SOCRATES, even being interrogated by him….Reading the Iliad was to undergo all the horrors of hand to hand combat in war, and to read the Odyssey was like skirting just above sea level in the Mediterranean, while to read Anna Karenina was to fall in love with the most radiant if undependable of women….And so it went…the Milton epigraph above the entrance to 315 [the NYPL]…A GOOD BOOK IS THE LIFE BLOOD OF A MASTER SPIRIT, and somehow you entered that.” 

                                            ~ Alfred Kazin, September 9, 1991