In an age when reading for most people is a nonintellectual pleasure, and when at the same time there is a constant stream of books falling from the publishers' presses, a book has only to be barely readable once in order to serve its purpose. It need not be reread, nor does it need to lie in the mind as a source of future pleasure. It thus ceases to matter whether a book is memorable; and when literature is not memorable it is nothing. Total illiterates who depend on folk literature for their pleasures of the imagination are thus much better off than semiliterates who read forgettable novels merely because they are available. Oral literature must lie in the mind, for otherwise it would be forgotten; but most modern written literature is expected to he forgotten, in order to make way of the next season's list. That is one reason why we feel that modern books are different in kind from ”the classics.
The fact is that literacy itself is a means and not an end, and it can be put to uses which may be good, bad, or indifferent. A book may be read for a great variety of reasons. But the reason for which a book is read determines the way it is read and to so1me extent the degree of illumination it is possible to get from it. All books should, of course, be read for pleasure, but ”pleasure” is not a helpful term here, for it has so many meanings. There are many kinds of pleasure, intellectua1 and nonintellectual, and even many kinds of intellectual pleasures. The appreciation of literature involves a very special kind of intellectual pleasure, in which the intellectual element is not always directly manifested and where the faculty which critics have come to call the imagination plays a complicated and not always definable part. The ability to read does not by itself guarantee the ability to enjoy that kind of pleasure; it has, in fact, no particular connection with it at all except that it provides the technique for communicating it to those in a position to receive it. Like patriotism, literacy is not enough.