Art & Creativity Quote by Cliff Fadiman

A “classic” is less a fixed artifact than a mirror with a long memory. Fadiman’s line punctures the pious idea that rereading is about extracting hidden secrets from Great Books, as if meaning were a finite mineral waiting to be mined by the worthy. The twist is quietly ego-centric in the best way: the book stays put; you change. What rereading reveals isn’t an author’s newly unlocked code but your altered equipment for noticing - your grief, your cynicism, your patience, your politics, your capacity for tenderness.

The intent is partly defensive, partly democratic. It defends the canon against the charge of irrelevance without pretending classics are magical objects. Their durability comes from being structurally roomy: characters and arguments are built with enough ambiguity, compression, and moral friction to meet readers at different ages. The subtext is also a rebuke to performative literacy. If you’re rereading to “get” the book once and for all, you’ve mistaken reading for credentialing. Rereading, in Fadiman’s view, is closer to self-auditing.

Context matters: Fadiman was a mid-century American literary tastemaker, a radio and magazine figure who helped translate “serious” literature for a broad public. In an era when culture was increasingly mediated and sped up, he makes a case for slow attention - not as nostalgia, but as a technology for personal growth. The classic survives because it doesn’t just outlast time; it measures it.