A man’s got to like many things in his life

A man’s got to like many things in his life is an expression that gathers Jack Reed’s broad appetite for experience into a compact personal credo. First associated with a young man’s pleasures and ambitions, it returns in altered wording beside a stark description of Reed’s political commitment, giving the idea a force beyond simple enjoyment.

The Expression and Its Early Meaning

The phrase accompanies a portrait of Reed as a vigorous, sociable young man who enjoys men and women, eating, writing, drinking, swimming, football, and rhymed verse. He is also drawn to public and intellectual life: he is a cheerleader and orator, makes clubs, and listens to Copey read. His ambitions have limits—he does not belong to the very highest-status clubs—but his interests range widely rather than narrowing to one pursuit.

This appetite extends beyond the campus. The prospect of taking a ship on a cattle boat promises travel, adventure, and stories to tell; Europe, and Paris in particular, appear as experiences to be eagerly taken in. Yet the expression does not reduce Reed’s outlook to pleasure or literary taste. The passage explicitly turns beyond the Oxford Book of English Verse to Lincoln Steffens’s account of the cooperative commonwealth, placing political possibility within the same wide field of things that command Reed’s attention.

From Enjoyment to Action

Later, the expression recurs in a changed form: a man has to do many things in his life. The shift from liking many things to having to do many things preserves the original breadth but adds an imperative. The phrase now suggests not only receptiveness to varied experience but a demand for active engagement.

That change sits beside the description of Reed as a westerner for whom words meant what they said. He throws everything he has, including himself, into the Smolny Institute. The juxtaposition makes the expression resonate as more than a genial celebration of appetite: the many things a life may contain include consequential political action, undertaken with the same wholeheartedness that marked Reed’s earlier enthusiasms.

Narrative Significance

The expression links separate dimensions of Reed’s characterization. Its first appearance gathers bodily, social, literary, and adventurous interests; its later variation carries that expansive energy into political commitment. The recurrence therefore marks continuity as well as change: Reed’s range of concern remains broad, while the language moves from what he likes toward what he must do.

The phrase also establishes a contrast between private enjoyment and public purpose without treating them as opposites. Books, travel, and sociability do not exhaust Reed’s life, and political conviction does not erase his appetite for experience. By returning in altered form immediately before his commitment at Smolny, the expression helps make that commitment feel like an extension of an already expansive way of living.