What We Think We Are

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

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.

It's True That The Young Who Now Flock To Script Writing, Or Producing And Directing, To Fulfill The Demands Of These New Devices Would, In An Earlier Period, Have Been Submitting To Magazines And Working On Their First Novels. But Even In The Midst Of All These "digital Products," The Wonder Of It Is That There Are Still So Many Young Writers Who Continue To Believe In The Venerable Print Novel As The Corridor To Fame And Fortune.

Nothing Is So Awesomely Unfamiliar As The Familiar That Discloses Itself At The End Of A Journey. Nothing Shakes The Heart So Much As Meeting-far, Far Away-what You Last Met At Home.

I Would Distinguish Between A Visitor And A Pilgrim: Both Will Come To A Place And Go Away Again, But A Visitor Arrives, A Pilgrim Is Restored. A Visitor Passes Through A Place; The Place Passes Through The Pilgrim.