I Want To Feel That

I Did Go Through Graduate School And I Like To Do Research, To Create Something That Has A Certain Objective Solidity. The Same Thing Influences My Fiction To Some Degree, Because, You Know, My Fiction Is Often Based On History That I've Read.

Isaac Watts, Of Course, Is A Hymn Writer In The Tradition Of Congregationalism Who Lived In The Seventeenth And Early Eighteenth Century. He Is Very Interesting And Important Because He Was Also A Metaphysician. He Knew A Great Deal About What Was, For Him, Contemporary Science. He Was Very Much Influenced By Isaac Newton, For Example. There Are Planets And Meteors And So On Showing Up In His Hymns Very Often. But, Again, The Scale Of His Religious Imagination Corresponds To A Very Generously Scaled Scientific Imagination.

We Have Opted For Petty Determinisms - Childhood Trauma, Genetic Inheritance, Social Conditioning, Etc. - That Have Made Us Comparatively Passive. We Seem To Prefer To Find Excuses - Which Are Really Nothing More Than The Embrace Of Determinism, A Sort Of Stockholm Syndrome Relative To Whatever We Can Claim As Limitation. I Am Fascinated By The More Enabling Self-understanding. It Has Helped Me To Find My Way Out Of The Cloying Comforts That Are Offered By Prevalent Psychological Models.

A Man Can Know His Father, Or His Son, And There Might Still Be Nothing Between Them But Loyalty And Love And Mutual Incomprehension.

Memory Is The Sense Of Loss, And Loss Pulls Us After It.