This I find delicious: If I had Cervantes’ genius, just as he purged Spain of the imitation of knights errant, I too would write a book purging Italy–indeed, the entire civilized world–of […] the habit of reading or reciting one’s own compositions to others. This very ancient custom was in past centuries a tolerable misery, since it was rare. But today, when everybody can write and when the hardest thing to find is someone who is not an author, this practice has become a scourge, a public calamity, one of life’s newest hardships.Read More