Italo Calvino Offers 14 Reasons We Should Read the Classics

1)  ….to read a great book for the first time in one’s maturity is an extraordinary pleasure, different from (though one cannot say greater or lesser than) the pleasure of having read it in one’s youth.

2) We use the word “classics” for those books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them.

3) There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth.

4) Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.

5) Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.

6) A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

7) The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through.

8) A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before.

9) The classics are books that we find all the more new, fresh, and unexpected upon reading, the more we thought we knew them from hearing them talked about.

10) We use the word “classic” of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans.

11) Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.

12) A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree.

13) A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise [...]

14) A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.