Oliver Sacks & Henri Cole

I remember all our swims together—we are both water creatures.… My own future is very uncertain—I hope I can live tranquilly, but intensely, until the last drop of life-energy is gone. Thank God for Billy … and so much else. 
Love, 
Oliver.

© Ferdinando Scianna

In “Loving Literature: A Cultural History,” Deidre Shauna Lynch, a professor of English at Harvard, shows us that it wasn’t always this way. For a long time, people didn’t love literature. They read with their heads, not their hearts (or at least they thought they did), and they were unnerved by the idea of readers becoming emotionally attached to books and writers. It was only over time, Lynch writes—over the century roughly between 1750 and 1850—that reading became a “private and passional” activity, as opposed to a “rational, civic-minded” one."

Joshua Rothman, in The history of 'loving' to read