The First And Perhaps The Most Important

In High School I Read [lev] Tolstoy's "anna Karenina" And Loved It. Then I Read [friedrich] Nietzsche's "on The Genealogy Of Morals" And That Hit Me Hard. I Don't Know Where I Got It. My Parents Warned Me Not To Mention Either Of Those Books When I Went For My College Interviews So I Wouldn't Seem Like An Egghead. They Told Me To Talk About Sports.

A Couple Of Years Ago I Picked Up New Yorker Writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "the Heart That Bleeds," Which Is Reportage From Latin America In The 1990s. You Can Predict That Some Books Will Give You A Thrill, But You Can't Predict The Books That Will Hit You Hard. It Is A Little Bit Like Falling In Love.

It Is Not That Shakespeare's Art Is In Technicolor And Fancy, And That Real Life Is Black And White And Tedious. The Life That Shakespeare Was Living Was The Only Life He Had, And He Had To Use It To Create What He Was Doing.

A Comparably Capacious Embrace Of Beauty And Pleasure - An Embrace That Somehow Extends To Death As Well As Life, To Dissolution As Well As Creation - Characterizes Montaigne's Restless Reflections On Matter In Motion, Cervantes's Chronicle Of His Mad Knight, Michelangelo's Depiction Of Flayed Skin, Leonardo's Sketches Of Whirlpools, Caravaggio's Loving Attention To The Dirty Soles Of Christ's Feet.

What I Wanted To Do Was To Get That Sense Of Being In Touch With This Lost World While Holding Onto What Draws Readers And Audiences There In The First Place.