The Greatest Obstacle To Pleasure Is Not

I Believe In Broken, Fractured, Complicated Narratives, But I Believe In Narratives As A Vehicle For Truth, Not Simply As A Form Of Entertainment, Though I Love Entertainment, But Also A Way Of Conveying What Needs To Be Conveyed About The Works That I Care About.

I Believe That It Is A Whole Lifetime Of Work On Shakespeare's Part That Enabled Him To Do What He Did. But The Question Is How You Can Explain This Whole Lifetime In Such A Way To Make It Accessible And Available To Us, To Me.

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 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.

I'm Reading Hans Kummer's "in Quest Of The Sacred Baboon." It's Wonderful. It's A Scientist's Journal About Baboons, But It Relates To The Search For Human Origin.