On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

The difficulty of balancing between excessive and deficient pleasures is evident all around us in many ways, not only in the present, but in human history as well. Two ancient schools of thought that demonstrate the extremes of excess and deficiency in regards to physical pleasures are Stoicism and Epicureanism, one advocating restraint and the other indulgence as the way to the good life. We might not adopt their extremes in such intensely philosophical ways today, but the influence of these approaches is all around us. This ping-ponging between excess and deficiency in the indulgence of our animal appetites manifests in endless ways in American culture today: all-you-can-eat buffets and detox diets, pornography and purity culture, fast food and slow food, the sexual revolution and the death of sex,10 McMansions and tiny houses, the prosperity gospel and the gospel of self-denial. Even in the longer view of our nation’s history, we see this wild pendulum swing: the excesses rampant today are the counter swing to the Puritan roots of our country’s beginning. This ongoing tension that has always defined American culture is at the heart of one of the most quintessentially American novels: The Great Gatsby.