Life's Pleasures Quote by Robertson Davies

Davies skewers a peculiarly modern vice: treating reading like moral housekeeping. The target isn’t the classics themselves, but the pious machinery built around them-the “guaranteed Hundred Best Books,” that consumer-grade promise that culture can be purchased in pre-sorted units. His opening clause, “Do not suppose,” anticipates the earnest misreader who hears any defense of literature as a commandment. Davies steps aside from the preacher’s pulpit and exposes how quickly “good taste” becomes a kind of social discipline.

The joke turns on “diet.” Classics-as-nutrition sounds wholesome until you picture the grim asceticism it produces. A diet is planned, restrictive, self-improving; it implies guilt when you stray. Davies has “seen such diets at work” like a doctor watching a fad regimen harm the patient: the reader who plows through approved titles not out of appetite, curiosity, or pleasure, but out of compliance. The result is spiritual indigestion-a person who’s “read” the canon yet somehow missed the point of reading.

“God save us” lands as mock-prayer and real warning. Reading “nothing but the best” is a paradox: it flattens experience, narrows surprise, and turns art into a checklist. Davies is defending the messy ecosystem that actually makes a reader: the minor book, the guilty pleasure, the weird detour, the contemporary voice, the failure. His subtext is generous and slightly savage: if your relationship to books is governed by certification, you’re not cultivating taste-you’re outsourcing it.