A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like, 'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read. W.h. Auden
About This Quote

In the 1970s, the British psychologist Anthony Storr developed a theory called "the storr effect." He theorized that from the age of four onward, children have a tendency to imitate their parents or caregivers. If a child is told not to do something, they will try to follow the rules and will lose interest in doing what they were originally told not to do. This can be seen as a problem with many adults. The issue is deciding how much of the society's culture you should listen to and follow.

The author John Green has an interesting way of explaining this phenomena: "I think that what we're talking about is just whether you're going to put yourself into the mental prison of conformity or whether you're going to fight for your own ideals and ideas and try to change things. It's really just a question of whether you want to be a part of the system or if you want to try and change it."

Source: The Dyers Hand

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