Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
Interpretation
Books provide a safe escape from the harshness of reality.
In this quote, Walter Pater emphasizes the protective and comforting nature of books. He suggests that literature serves as a sanctuary, allowing readers to retreat from the harshness and trivialities of everyday life, offering them a space for contemplation and intellectual freedom.
In practice
During a book club meeting to reflect on the comforting power of literature.
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life . . . Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end . . . For art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
We seek a constitutional amendment to permit voluntary school prayer. God should never have been expelled from America's classrooms in the first place.
But if for the physical life it is necessary to have the child exposed to the vivifying forces of nature, it is also necessary for his psychical life to place the soul of the child in contact with creation.
I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.
Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.
I wrote 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' right out of my own experiences and my own feelings when I was in sixth grade.
I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right but especially their wrong answers.
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