For the Love of it: Amateuring and Its Rivals Book

What is the point of pursuing any skill when you know that you'll never come close to "the top"? Why would anyone spend free hours and weekends on a demanding practice that promises no payoff in money, fame, or power? Is it true that anything worth doing is worth doing only if you can get credit for doing it really well? Why do amateurs do what they do? Wayne Booth found himself enticed by these questions after taking up the cello at age thirty-one and then experiencing decades not just of unforeseen struggle but of comic and humiliating disasters--followed by hours of astonishing bliss playing chamber music. For the Love of It is the story not only of this intimate struggle between man and cello but also of the larger struggle between a society obsessed with success and payoff and individuals who choose challenging hobbies that yield no payoff except the love of it. This fundamental opposition leads Booth into diverse meditations on how amateuring relates to all other loves and pleasures. In his celebration of how the amateur's laboring can blossom, he thus joins a long line of thinkers who have puzzled over the meanings of "fun," "work," and "love." The questions that Booth, the amateur cellist, faces are precisely those that everyone might ask about all our ways of spending time--or wasting it, salvaging it, glorifying it. For anyone who has ever bought an instrument or sat down with a canvas and a paintbrush, For the Love of It offers a joyous exploration of the "why" of amateuring: not only for the fun of it, but for the love of it, for the quality of the life lived while doing it.Read More