Great Books Are Readable Anyway.

Back Then, Things Were Plainer: Less Money, No Electronic Devices, Little Fashion Tyranny, No Girlfriends. There Was Nothing To Distract Us From Our Human And Filial Duty Which Was To Study, Pass Exams, Use Those Qualifications To Find A Job, And Then Put Together A Way Of Life Unthreateningly Fuller Than That Of Our Parents, Who Would Approve, While Privately Comparing It To Their Own Earlier Lives, Which Had Been Simpler, And Therefore Superior.

And Perhaps It Was Also The Case That, For All A Lifetime's Internal Struggling, You Were Finally No More Than What Others Saw You As. That Was Your Nature, Whether You Liked It Or Not.

Not Merely Hope, But Any Burdensome Yearning: Ambition, Hatred, Love (especially Love) - How Rarely Do Our Emotions Meet The Object They Seem To Deserve? How Hopelessly We Signal; How Dark The Sky; How Big The Waves. We Are All Lost At See, Washed Between Hope And Despair, Hailing Something That May Never Come To Rescue Us. Catastrophe Has Become Art; But This Is No Reducing Process. It Is Freeing, Enlarging, Explaining. Catastrophe Has Become Art: That Is, After All, What It Is For.

How Often Do We Tell Our Own Life Story? How Often Do We Adjust, Embellish, Make Sly Cuts? And The Longer Life Goes On, The Fewer Are Those Around To Challenge Our Account, To Remind Us That Our Life Is Not Our Life, Merely The Story We Have Told About Our Life. Told To Others, But — Mainly — To Ourselves.

You Put Together Two Things That Have Not Been Put Together Before. And The World Is Changed.