When I tell a story he has heard so often he could lip-synch to it, he is to pretend to be hearing it for the first time, and to be appreciating it as much as or more than our guests are.
Appreciating it as art may be less important than recognizing its warning about the destruction of public space.
And when it really was well done, as well as appreciating it as literature or art, something else happened, which was that I started wondering: what's the trick?
I first saw it when I was 10, and far from appreciating it as one of the great feminist films of all time, I was so excited to be watching a movie that had the word "dirty" in the title that I spent the whole film waiting for it to finish so I could call my friend Lauren and brag.
Cyril Connolly, in The Modern Movement (1965), followed Greene by referring to Ford's "war trilogy" (though, far from newly appreciating it as such, he patronisingly dismissed the whole book); but most subsequent editors have chosen to view it as a quartet rather than trilogy.
One Book Called Ulysses, becoming a kind of spokesman for the American lay reader, not only helping to give people wide access to the book but also offering a guide in appreciating it as "a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women".
