Reading with Hope

For if this particular book is not giving me pleasure now, it may give me pleasure later, if I allow it to do so. Maybe it's just starting slowly but will pick up speed; maybe I haven't fully grasped the idiom it's working in but eventually will figure it out; maybe the problem is not with the book but with my own powers of cocentration because I slept fitfully last night. Or maybe, for some reason I don't understand, today is not one of the High Holidays of my spirit.

- Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 42.

High Holidays of the Spirit

When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit...

- W. H. Auden quoted by Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 23.

Hippos on Holiday

is not really the title of a movie
but if it was I should be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theater.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?

-Billy Collins, Ballistics, 42.