Our annual Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening series will begin tomorrow. As someone firmly embedded in old age, I've become increasingly focused on the importance of pleasure. Granted, on difficult days, pleasure can be fleeting. But for those of us old people who don't believe we will achieve immortality or super-longevity, there can be no contest between pleasure and its economic opposite, capital accumulation.
(Hmm... Does that mean that old people are akin to Aesop's grasshopper? It's complicated, I guess. But it certainly does suggest that spending a lifetime playing music, writing books, making art doesn't count as productive work...)
Not that the writers and readers of these year-end pieces are all old people blessed (or cursed) with a heightened awareness of their mortality. I think pleasure--and an outright emphasis on it and a recognition that it is necessary for any human's flourishing (which includes the recognition that making other human beings miserable is an attack of their very existence)--is especially important now.
The Pleasures series includes more than the pleasures offered by books, although books are the general focus of this blog. In past years the series has shown that reading, viewing, and listening pleasures vary widely. And that is what has made me keep this series going. I love the variety of tastes and practices it repeatedly reveals. This year's iteration will include posts by Andrea Hairston, Christopher Brown, Nisi Shawl, Sarah Tolmie, Sofia Rhei, Cheryl Morgan, and others.
I hope you'll enjoy reading the pieces in this year's series as much as I do and that they'll swell the list of titles you want to read, view, and listen to yourself. We all know that the volume of books published is so tremendous that that really wonderful work often slips below one's personal radar.
Part 1: Tara Campbell
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