Extollager
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
- Messages
- 9,206
---“Perhaps the ideal reader is an adolescent: restless, vulnerable, passionate, hungry to learn, skeptical and naïve by turns, believing in the power of the imagination to change, if not life itself, one’s comprehension of life. The degree to which we remain adolescents is the degree to which we remain ideal readers, for whom the act of opening a book can be a sacred one, fraught with psychic risk.” Joyce Carol Oates, “The One Unforgivable Sin,” New York Review of Books 25 July 1993, p. 3.----
I found this quotation, which I'd written in an old notebook. It jibes with that famous remark about the Golden Age of science fiction being 12 (or 14).
Worth discussing? Is she right? Does that sound like it applies to your own experience? What do we, or should we, gain as we get older? Has anyone read any of Oates's fiction (I don't believe I have)? Have you encountered that youthful eagerness in any person of mature years (e.g. a teacher)?
I was reminded of the remark someone made about C. S. Lewis as retaining a "boyish" quality. His letters and his scholarly writings convey a love of reading, an eagerness, a receptivity close to what Oates mentions, right up to the time of his death.
I found this quotation, which I'd written in an old notebook. It jibes with that famous remark about the Golden Age of science fiction being 12 (or 14).
Worth discussing? Is she right? Does that sound like it applies to your own experience? What do we, or should we, gain as we get older? Has anyone read any of Oates's fiction (I don't believe I have)? Have you encountered that youthful eagerness in any person of mature years (e.g. a teacher)?
I was reminded of the remark someone made about C. S. Lewis as retaining a "boyish" quality. His letters and his scholarly writings convey a love of reading, an eagerness, a receptivity close to what Oates mentions, right up to the time of his death.