In the nineteen-seventies, when I was a teen-ager and had fantasies of growing up to be a writer, I didn’t dream of being a novelist or a poet. I wanted to be a critic. I thought criticism was exciting, and I found critics admirable. This was because I learned from them. Every week a copy of The New Yorker would arrive at our house on Long Island, wrapped in a brown wrapper upon which the (I thought) disingenuously modest label NEWSPAPER was printed, and I would hijack the issue before my dad came home from work in order to continue an education that was, then, more important to me than the one I was getting in school.

I learned. I learned about music, particularly opera, from the fantastically detailed reviews by Andrew Porter, the music critic—mini-essays so encyclopedic in their grasp of this or that composer’s oeuvre, so detailed in their descriptions of the libretto and score of the work in question, from Mozart to (a great favorite of his, I distinctly recall) Michael Tippett, that the review could be half over before he got around to talking about the performance under review. But this was the point: by the time he described what he’d seen on stage, you—the reader—had the background necessary to appreciate (or deprecate) the performance as he had described it. I learned about other things. Thanks to Helen Vendler, who in those days regularly contributed long and searching essays about contemporary poets and their work, I began to think about poetry, its aims and methods; and perceived, too, that good poetry ought to be able to withstand the kind of rigor that she brought to her discussion of it. (In those high-school days, we thought that poetry was pretty much anything about “feelings.”)

I was fascinated to see, too, that what I then thought of as less exalted forms of entertainment could be subject to the same erudite and penetrating discussions. Although there was only a tiny chance, in 1975, that I was going to spend an evening at the Algonquin or Carlyle, I always read Whitney Balliett’s review of cabaret performances—of people singing the kind of music my dad liked to listen to on the car radio as he drove me to my weekly guitar lessons, the red bar of the car radio display unwaveringly loyal to Jonathan Schwartz’s Frank Sinatra show. My parents’ music, the “Great American Songbook,” had no particular interest for me just then, but I was provoked, by Balliett’s quietly appreciative dissections of an evening of (say) Julie Wilson at the Algonquin, to think a bit harder than I had previously done about what a song was, how it was made, what was the difference between a good lyric and a sloppy lyric, how best that lyric might be brought across in performance, and, finally what effect it was supposed to have on you.

I would always save Pauline Kael for last, because I loved that she wrote the way most people talked; her now-famous second-personal-singular address made me feel included in her fierce and lengthy encomia or diatribes—and made me want to be smart enough to deserve that inclusion. And with Kael, too, I was startled and delighted to see that the kind of movies I saw with my friends (“Carrie,” say) could be the object of sustained, cantankerous, and searching critique.

In all the years I read these writers, as I went through high school and then college and grad school, it never occurred to me that they were trying to persuade me to actually see this or that performance, buy this or that volume, or take in this or that movie; nor did I imagine that I was being bullied or condescended to, or that I wasn’t allowed to disagree with them. I thought of these writers above all as teachers, and like all good teachers they taught by example; the example that they set, week after week, was to recreate on the page the drama of how they had arrived at their judgments. (The word critic, as I learned much later, comes from the Greek word for “judge.”)

That drama, that process, it seemed to me as I read those critics (and, in time, others: Arlene Croce in this magazine, when finally I began to appreciate dance; Arthur Danto on art in The Nation; some others) involved two crucial elements. The first was expertise. If Vendler was writing about the latest volume of poetry by, say, James Merrill, it was clear from her references that she’d read and thought about everything else Merrill had ever written; what you were getting in the review wasn’t just an opinion about the book under review, but a way of seeing that book against all of the poet’s other work. Ditto for the others. To read a review by Croce about this or that performance of a Balanchine ballet was to get a history of the work itself, a mini-tutorial in Balanchine technique, and a capsule history, for comparison’s sake, of other significant performances of the same work. (Here again, the review was not merely building a case for Croce’s final judgment, but was also giving you, the reader, the tools to evaluate the description of the performance at hand.) Even when you disagreed with them, their judgments had authority, because they were grounded in something more concrete, more available to other people, than “feelings” or “impressions.”

It wasn’t that these people were Ph.D.s, that the expertise and authority evident on every page of their writing derived from a diploma hanging on an office wall. I never knew, while reading Kael, whether she had a degree in Film Studies (even if I’d known such a thing existed back then), nor did I care; it never occurred to me that Whitney Balliett ought to have some kind of academic credential in order to pass judgments on Bobby Short singing “Just One of Those Things” at the Café Carlyle. If anything, you felt that their immense knowledge derived above all from their great love for the subject. I was raised by a scientist and a schoolteacher, and it was salutary for me to be reminded that authority could derive from passion, not pieces of paper.

Knowledge, then—however you got it—was clearly the crucial foundation of the judgment to come. The second crucial component in the drama of criticism, the reagent that got you from the knowledge to the judgment, was taste, or sensibility—whatever it was in the critic’s temperament or intellect or personality that the work in question worked on. From this, as much as from anything else, I learned a great deal. For one thing, it was clear that taste itself could be a mystery: I tried and failed for years to love Michael Tippett’s operas, and could never quite follow Kael to the altar of Brian De Palma.

More largely, and ultimately more importantly, the glimpses these writers gave you of their tastes and passions revealed what art and culture are supposed to do for a person. I still remember a review that Porter wrote of a production of Mozart’s “Così fan tutte”—this must have been in the late nineteen-seventies or early eighties—in which he said the expression on the face of the soprano Elisabeth Söderström, during the banquet scene in the second act, had made him weep—because it suggested, economically but with tremendous impact, the darkness that lies at the heart of that, and all, comedy. I recall being a little shocked as I read the piece that a grown man could admit in public to being moved to tears by a performance of an old opera.