Calvino's "Why Read the Classics?" Passage

Throughout the lecture, "Why Read the Classics?" by Italo Calvino, a couple of passages captured my attention. The main passage was under the first definition, "The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: 'I'm rereading...', never 'I'm reading...'" (Calvino 3) This means that the books have been around for awhile and that most people have already read them. The passage is, "What this shows is that reading a great work for the first time when one is fully adult is an extraordinary pleasure, one which is very different (though it is impossible to say whether more or less pleasurable) from reading it in one's youth." (Calvino 4) I think that adults find the classics more interesting because they are more mature and know and understand the dialect. Teens and young adults may have a different perspective because they are not used to reading the different ways the books are written. It takes some getting used to but after awhile it becomes better. Another passage that caught my eye was under definition number nine, "Classics are books which, the more we think we know then through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them." (Calvino 6) A lot of the time people make inceptions about the book which they think are right but once they read the book they find out that there is so much more to it. The passage is, "it is no use reading classics out of a sense of duty or respect, we should only read them for love." (Calvino 6) This means that you should not read books because you are forced to, but because you want to read them.

Calvino, Italo. "Why Read the Classics." Lecture.