Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robertson Davies

Davies slides a quiet knife under the status hierarchy of reading. “Great” isn’t a trophy stamped by critics or syllabi; it’s a relationship, intensely time-stamped, between a mind and a page. The provocation is in the demotion of “instructive” - not because learning is bad, but because instruction is easy to fetishize. We tell ourselves we’re reading for self-improvement when we’re often reading for permission: to feel less alone, to have a private chaos named, to get a moral posture without the mess of lived experience.

His phrasing keeps moving from public criteria to private necessity. “The most to say to you” frames a book as an interlocutor, not a monument. “Feeds your spirit” dodges the Puritan suspicion that pleasure is frivolous. It argues that nourishment can be aesthetic, psychological, even irrational - and still be legitimate. The subtext is anti-snobbery with standards: Davies isn’t saying any book is great; he’s saying greatness is situational, contingent on who you are when you meet it.

Context matters: Davies is a 20th-century novelist steeped in myth, Jung, and the idea that people develop in stages. So his list - age, experience, “psychological and spiritual need” - reads like a map of inner weather. You don’t outgrow books; you circle back to them as a different person and they become different books. The line doubles as a defense of rereading and a critique of the adult habit of treating art as homework. In Davies’ world, the point isn’t to be improved; it’s to be met.