"It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old"
About this Quote
Pleasure, in Leigh Hunt's hands, isn't a guilty indulgence or a dour duty; it's a skill you can practice, edit, and eventually archive. The line flatters books by giving them a job beyond instruction: they tutor taste. "Refine our pleasures" suggests that reading doesn't cancel appetite, it calibrates it - teaching you which delights are cheap sugar and which have staying power. Hunt, a Romantic-era poet and essayist with a critic's sensibility, is arguing for pleasure with standards: not asceticism, not bingeing, but a cultivated capacity to enjoy.
The subtext is quietly polemical. In an age when reading was often defended on moral grounds (improving character, restraining vice), Hunt defends it on hedonistic ones. Books matter because they make life feel better and, crucially, more intelligible. The second clause flips youth's forward momentum into old age's backward glance: reading becomes a technology of memory. A refined pleasure isn't just sharper in the moment; it's more retrievable later, able to be "recalled... with satisfaction" rather than regret or confusion.
There's also a class and civic undertone: refinement implies access, training, and the democratizing promise that print can offer those without inherited "taste" a route into it. Hunt is selling literature as portable cultivation - a way to build an inner life that can outlast the body's diminishing options. The sentence is built like that life: present-tense apprenticeship, future-tense consolation.
The subtext is quietly polemical. In an age when reading was often defended on moral grounds (improving character, restraining vice), Hunt defends it on hedonistic ones. Books matter because they make life feel better and, crucially, more intelligible. The second clause flips youth's forward momentum into old age's backward glance: reading becomes a technology of memory. A refined pleasure isn't just sharper in the moment; it's more retrievable later, able to be "recalled... with satisfaction" rather than regret or confusion.
There's also a class and civic undertone: refinement implies access, training, and the democratizing promise that print can offer those without inherited "taste" a route into it. Hunt is selling literature as portable cultivation - a way to build an inner life that can outlast the body's diminishing options. The sentence is built like that life: present-tense apprenticeship, future-tense consolation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
|---|
More Quotes by Leigh
Add to List
