Reading Should Be A Joy

 I confess I only know of Jorge Luis Borges. I like to think I have read one of his stories. I consider this one of the great gaping holes in my education.

After all who can dislike a great writer (and a teacher!) who could say something like this:

“Reading should be a form of happiness,” Borges said in a famous interview given in 1978. “I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading’ is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of ‘obligatory pleasure’? What for? Pleasure is not obligatory.” Few writers can claim to have read as much as Borges did, and there are almost no other writers whose imagination was so fixed on literature, on books, and on reading. But even though he taught at a university for decades, Borges refused to consider studying literature work; he wanted his students to enjoy reading. He chose reading for pleasure over the kind of “sad university-style reading” that emphasizes the importance of citations, references, and footnotes. We can’t help being impressed by the incredible array of books and authors Borges discusses in his fictions and his essays, but we must remember that he read them because he loved them, because when he opened up those volumes he felt the “secret portals of heaven” opening up over his head. This blind librarian, teacher, and brilliant author was a self-proclaimed literary hedonist. Punctilious professors take note.

That is from Jeff Peer's essay A Literary Hedonist in the Classroom: On Professor Borges. I commend the whole essay to you.

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