se checker boards and moral treatises which used to annoy Elia so.

Yes, I have a sneaking feeling that all this modern fuss about "art"
and the "creative vision" and "the projection of visualized images,"
is the itching vice of quite a different class of people, from those
who, in the old, sweet, epicurean way, loved to loiter through huge
digressive books, with the ample unpremeditated enjoyment of leisurely
travelers wayfaring along a wonderful road. How many luckless
innocents have teased and fretted their minds into a forced
appreciation of that artistic ogre Flaubert, and his laborious pursuit
of his precious "exact word," when they might have been pleasantly
sailing down Rabelais' rich stream of immortal nectar, or sweetly
hugging themselves over the lovely mischievousness of Tristram Shandy!
But one must be tolerant; one must make allowances. The world of books
is no puritanical bourgeois-ridden democracy; it is a large free
country, a great Pantagruelian Utopia, ruled by noble kings.

Our "One Hundred Best Books" need not be yours, nor yours ours; the
essential thing is that in this brief interval between darkness and
darkness, which we call our life, we should be thrillingly and
passionately amused; innocently, if so it can be arranged--and what
better than books lends itself to that?--and harmlessly, too, let us
hope, God help us, but at any rate, amused, for the only unpardonable
sin is the sin of taking this passing world too gravely. Our treasure
is not here; it is in the kingdom of heaven, and the kingdom of heaven
is Imagination. Imagination! How all other ways of escape from what is
mediocre in our tangled lives grow pale beside that high and burning
star!

With Imagination to help us we can make something of our days,
something of the drama of this confused turmoil, and perhaps, after
all--who can tell?--there is more in it than mere "amusement." Once
and again, as we pause in our reading, there comes a breath, a
whisper, a rumor, of something else; of something over and above that
"eternal now" which is the wisest preoccupation of our passion, but
not wise are those who would seek to confine this fleeting intimation
within the walls of reason or of system. It comes; it goes; it is; it
is not. The Hundred Best Books did not bring it; the Hundred Best
Books cannot take it away. Strangely and wonderfully it blends itself
with those vague memories of what we have read, somewhere, sometime,
and not alwa