To Desire To Be What

The Imagination Is A Species Of Knowledge, Knowledge That Can Take The Form Of Discovery.

Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are Not Found To Be Likable. Is Raskolnikov Likable? Is King Lear? The Plethora Of Such Naive Readers Testifies To A Failure Of Imagination - The Capacity To See Into Unfamiliar Lives, Motives, Feelings - And This Failure Must, At Least In Part, Be The Failure Of The Teaching Of Literature In The Schools.

In The Compact Between Novelist And Reader, The Novelist Promises To Lie, And The Reader Promises To Allow It.

Real Apprenticeship Is Ultimately Always To The Self.

Literature Is An Instrument Of A Culture, Not A Summary Of It.