October 25, 2021
Taste is not learned out of books; it is not given from one person to another. Therein lies its profundity. At school, fatuous masters would say of poems they didn’t like, using the old Latin saw, De gustibus non disputandem est — there’s no accounting for taste. And so there isn’t. Taste is like a perverse coral: it grows slowly and inexorably into unpredictable shapes, precisely because it’s an offshoot of living iteself. Acquiring taste, then, is not a result of study; it’s a talent for living life.
Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur, 2004.
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