The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn't help himself. To him it wasn't a means to a lecture of article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn't this what the work of art demands of us?...So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim!
-Randall Jarrell, quoted by Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
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