One of the most welcome reliefs from academic drudgery is also a simple one: reading for pleasure. The columnist finds, as he turns from academic to non-academic reading, a bliss similar to that derived from plunging one's head into a cold water-basin after having a hotpoker pressed against the forehead for hours.
Leisure reading is one of the few wholesome and guiltless pleasures the world affords us. Easily picked up, the reading habit, like an engrossing book, becomes impossible to lay aside. Done properly, leisure reading takes its place among the most mentally involving and emotionally intense human pursuits; the vignettes and characters one encounters remain with one forever. The author, for instance, never dreamed that when Cupid's barbed darts at last pierced his ivory breast, they would do so in the form of an illicit love. Yet such has been the case; he is hopelessly enamoured of a character in Mr Anthony Trollope's political novels, the Lady Glencora Palliser-- a married woman, no less! How fortunate he may feel as a leisure reader, that he cannot be lead astray by his heart's victrix, for she is after all not flesh-and-blood--yet would he surrender her acquaintance for that? Not for worlds.
But the effort with which the endeavour of leisure reading must be approached to be of any lasting value, while not of such intensity as to render the epithet "leisure" inaccurate, nevertheless must involve no little investment of attention and thought. Reading for pleasure constitutes a prolonged bushwhacking bout, one might say, through the imaginative tendrils and creepers of the author. The path cleared at the end will only lead the adventurous spirit--the true leisure reader--to strike out in a new direction.
One never ceases to be agreeably surprised by how little, with good poetry or prose, the origins, politics or historic era of a writer matter; it is possible to derive equal pleasure and profit from Firdausi's "Yusuf and Zuleikha" and Beerbohm's "Zuleika Dobson," from the romantic poems of the celebrated German Goethe and those of the criminally neglected Dane Oehlenschlager. This brings to mind another of the benefits of a extracurricular reading, viz., the unexpected gems that one may stumble upon..
It is occasionally bittersweet to reflect on how many good and great works there are in less widely-spoken tongues, that will for that unfortunate chance alone never reach our eyes. But we ought to rejoice in those many wonderful works (and there are enough for ten thousand lifetimes) which have been made accessible to us, through our particular good fortune as English-speakers, our language very much in the ascendant, by means of the labours of translators. The author is certainly conscious of this debt of gratitude when contemplating this or that extraordinary passage in Tanizaki or Endo, Lampedusa or Manzoni.
One last brief word should be said concerning organization. It is best not to trip blithely from one work to another in unsystematic fashion, but rather to introduce a measure of coherence and some slight framework into one's leisure reading. The author generally follows the train of three prose works at any one time, one a Greco-Roman work, one an English novel, the third either a fluffy bit of murder mystery or science fiction, or a work of history, or a play. Within such very broad guidelines one can find endless sources of amusement and education; though the education one can get through leisure reading is of a very different, in certain ways richer, sort from that which the classroom can instill.
The humble columnist has once before in these pages railed against the notion of diets or regimens. Let him herewith publicly modify that ungentle proscription, and instead suggest a capital regimen for the run-down Dartmouth student: every week-night, fifty pages of leisure prose reading, or two longer poems, or a generous slice of Sacher torte, with a cup of camomile tea, or the equivalent.
