Thom Gunn and the good life

The poet Thom Gunn wrote to a friend: 

I can hardly imagine a life more to my taste than mine.

 

I love that remark. When you’re talking about a good life, taste is important. A lot of what made Gunn’s life good for him would not make life good for me. 

I admire Gunn’s drive to live a life in accord with his own values. It seems to me that’s a large part of what a good life is: living by one’s own values, rather by someone else’s.

What’s blurry to me is the distinction between taste and other kinds of values. I understand that some people can made a kind of culture out of motorcycles. But I can’t, and it doesn’t seem to me that’s just a matter of taste. I’d have to be a different person — have a different temperament, a different personality — to pull that off.

I almost want to talk of human natures, rather than human nature.

• Source: Dwight Garner, “In ‘The Letters of Thom Gunn,’ an Unusual Mix of Pleasures”; The New York Times, May 16, 2022.