A kid inside the critic

Sitting on top of my bookshelf, there’s a book I’ve been reading lately. Luckily, I don’t have any papers to write on it or passages to bookmark for class discussion. It’s got a cheerful blue and yellow cover, decorated with the silhouettes of four children and a dog splashing in some water. It’s called “The Penderwicks at Point Mouette,” by Jeanne Birdsall, and it’s a kids’ chapter book about a family that goes on summer vacation to Maine. I’ve been reading it before I go to bed—not only is it relaxing, it’s also pretty enjoyable, and certainly better than thinking about all the homework I didn’t have time to do.

This is really strange, I know, especially considering I’m an English major. I spend my days immersed in Shakespeare and Milton, filling my head with John Donne and Jane Austen and analyzing these writers in attempts to figure out what makes them so excellent. And I’ve gotten pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. After two and a half years of doing this, I feel like I could talk with reasonable intelligence on just about any work of literature. If you asked me, I could probably tell you why such-and-such a plot device worked, why one sentence was too long while the other fit the rhythm of the piece, and how all the other things make something in a work of literature “good” or “bad.” My tastes are becoming refined and sharpened in college. And this isn’t just a phenomenon for people who study the liberal arts—most of my friends’ tastes, from music to journalism, have changed during the course of their time here. If you asked your average Columbian, he would probably say he watches better movies or eats at better restaurants or enjoys better art than he did before he came here. This is what everybody wants, after all—to know what’s excellent, so we can enjoy it and appreciate it properly. Nobody wants to spend the rest of his life thinking instant ramen is the best food ever created.

But on the other hand, there’s a danger in this sharpening of our enjoyments. We can forget that just because something isn’t the best in the world, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be good. Many of the discussions I have with my friends about music and books swerve in this direction. The endgame is to convince each other that X is much better than Y, isn’t it? We want to justify our interests based on their excellence. And if we know that X is not objectively better than Y, then we have to justify our interests some other way. I’ve heard people trying to convince each other that even though Kurt Vonnegut is not Shakespeare, there is some other intrinsic value to reading Vonnegut, even if they don’t believe he’s the best author the world has ever produced. They say things like, “I mean, he’s not the best, but…” And this saddens me. There’s a whole range of excellent and enjoyable books, and just because “Slaughterhouse Five” isn’t on the same level as “Hamlet” doesn’t mean that no one should read “Slaughterhouse Five,” or that it’s on par with the world’s most poorly written book (whatever that may be—“Twilight,” perhaps?). Take “The Penderwicks,” for example. It’s not the work of a literary genius, but the characters are well-written, and the world they belong to has a cozy, warm, and loving feeling that draws you in and makes you wish you belonged to the Penderwick family. And so I read it before bed, and I enjoy it just as much as “Paradise Lost,” although Jeanne Birdsall is no Milton (and likely wasn’t aiming to be).

Enjoying things because they are excellent makes sense. But maybe we’ve narrowed our definition of “excellent” too far. Ever rewatched the movies you loved as a kid? Sometimes you think, “Man, this movie was really good,” and sometimes you think, “I can’t believe I liked this.” But back then, you enjoyed it all anyway. It would be sad if we let college rob us of our ability to enjoy all but a select number of things. Let’s be kids in the things we take delight in, not just critics.

Kathryn Brill is a Barnard College junior majoring in English. She is a member of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. We Should Talk runs alternate Mondays.