I Know Only Enough Of God To

What I Sought In Books Was Imagination. It Was Depth, Depth Of Thought And Feeling; Some Sort Of Extreme Of Subject Matter; Some Nearness To Death; Some Call To Courage. I Myself Was Getting Wild; I Wanted Wildness, Originality, Genius, Rapture, Hope. ... What I Sought In Books Was A World Whose Surfaces, Whose People And Events And Days Lived, Actually Matched The Exaltation Of The Interior Life. There You Could Live.

There Is A Certain Age At Which A Child Looks At You In All Earnestness And Delivers A Long, Pleased Speech In All The True Inflections Of Spoken English, But With Not One Recognizable Syllable. There Is No Way You Can Tell The Child That If Language Had Been A Melody, He Had Mastered It And Done Well, But That Since It Was In Fact A Sense, He Had Botched It Utterly.

There Is No Whit Less Enlightenment Under The Tree By Your Street Than There Was Under The Buddha's Bo Tree. I Invite You To Go Sit Under That Tree By Your Street.

I Write In My Own Journal When Something Extraordinary Or Funny Happens. And There's Some Nice Imagery In There. I Don't Think Of What To Do With It.

Dan Gerber Is One Of Our Finest Living Poets.