In the late second century AD, a trend swept the Roman Empire: the performance of playful rhetorical displays purely for entertainment. Some of these pieces took the form of the encomium—a praise essay for one topic or another, sometimes delivered tongue-in-cheek—like the “Encomium on Hair” and corresponding “Encomium on Baldness.” The point of these pieces was less to convey information—although many were superbly researched and dotted with obscure details. Rather, the primary emphasis was on beauty, delight, and playfulness conveyed in words.
Audiences turned out to readings of such pieces for the sheer entertainment value, expecting to hear rhetorical virtuosos, whose day job often was teaching rhetoric to aristocratic children. One of the masters of the genre was Apuleius, a philosophical writer best known today for his Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, the only novel in Latin to survive from the Roman Empire in its entirety. And in his novel, just as in his shorter rhetorical performance writings, collected in the book Florida (“flowery things”), Apuleius showed that good writing doesn’t always have to be serious. It can be quite fun—as seen in his elaborate and whimsically detailed essay on how to train a parrot.
The age of mass literacy and journalism has led to the proliferation of op-eds and serious, analytical essays. There is, of course, value to such writing. But, just as we cannot be all business all the time, so it is important to remember that there can be good, true, and beautiful writing whose primary purpose is not the conveyance of information, news, and policy, but simple delight and soul-uplifting play—accomplished through words, ideas, and dreams. To read such writing is to be entertained and reminded that the realm of art includes art made with words.
David Bentley Hart, the philosopher, theologian, and translator, is master of such writing. He specializes in such doorstopper-sized books as All Things Are Full of Gods, a philosophical dialogue about reality and worlds visible and not. While Hart is widely known as a serious essayist, he also writes short pieces merely for the sake of joy and whimsy—he has been doing so regularly on his Substack, Leaves in the Wind. University of Notre Dame Press has now gathered a collection of these short pieces in one volume, aptly titled A Gathering of Leaves. There is no explicit argument here—just a collection of essays, each of them a standalone. But the collection overall is, put simply, delightful.
It takes a remarkable writer to produce texts at once so insightful and eclectic. Most Substacks—my own included—do not merit being turned into books. But Hart’s playful reflections on topics as varied as baseball, music, ghosts in Japanese culture, commentary on Mr. Toad (from The Wind in the Willows), Cormac McCarthy’s literary merits (or lack thereof), and Australia evince an artful wordsmith, able to write on any topic with joy and honesty, yet without taking himself too seriously. It’s almost enough to forgive him his admitted dislike of The Wind in the Willows.
Indeed, he acknowledges the aims in the introduction: “On the whole, the purpose of this volume is reading for reading’s sake; if it contains any great wisdom or notable profundity anywhere in its pages, be assured that this is entirely accidental, if sometimes inevitable, and I ask the reader’s indulgence in all such cases.” A thesis of sorts—or, more like an anti-thesis.
It is fitting that some of the essays touch on the writing process. I particularly enjoyed “On Writing English Prose,” where Hart recommends his personal favorites, reading whom in his view is the best writing instruction one can receive. The list includes Robert Louis Stevenson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, J. A. Baker, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Vladimir Nabokov. Indeed, for writers amateur and professional, this essay may be the most valuable in the book. I particularly appreciated Hart’s reflection on vocabulary: “When the occasion presents itself for using an outlandishly obscure but absolutely precise and appropriate word, use it.”
It is no secret that Hart reads widely—and, therefore, engages with a broad range of literary and philosophical traditions. His longstanding interest in the literature and philosophy of the East is on display in essays on the poetry of Li Bai (an 8th-century Chinese poet) and on The Monkey, a Chinese picaresque novel about the mischievous Monkey who attempts to attain Buddhist enlightenment. The book’s concluding essay brings together Nabokov and others to consider the notion of a personal doppelgänger, allegedly stalking Hart across time and space.
And yet, while the learning on display in Hart’s volume is astonishing, the breadth of his knowledge is clearly not the point. Instead, his joy in studying and reflecting on these topics comes through clearly: the intellectual life really is great fun, wild rabbit trails included.
Hart’s mission in this volume is to be lauded. There should be more playful writing in our literary culture, especially from those whose playfulness is rooted in deep learning made accessible. Some of the decline in reading, after all, is connected to a narrow view of reading books as something instrumental, required only for the receiving of information.
If one reads only for gathering essential facts, then using AI or other tools to summarize books makes perfect sense—indeed, CliffNotes summaries have been available for decades. But if at least some reading is oriented toward experiences of delight and beauty, then it becomes clearer why such shortcuts miss the entire point of reading which values the process much more than the end goal. And if writing can be for no purpose other than enjoyment, then the idea of outsourcing it to machines would be as inconceivable as having a computer eat your dessert or spend a glorious day outside for you. “See? Isn’t this beautiful?” some moments in life require us to ask. In response, we should joyfully pull up a chair or spread a picnic blanket, and partake of the gift extended to us.