The World Does Not Get To Be

In The Finest Critics One Hears The Full Cry Of The Human. They Tell One Why It Matters To Read.

Aesthetic Value Emanates From The Struggle Between Texts: In The Reader, In Language, In The Classroom, In Arguments Within A Society. Aesthetic Value Rises Out Of Memory, And So (as Nietzsche Saw) Out Of Pain, The Pain Of Surrendering Easier Pleasures In Favour Of Much More Difficult Ones ... Successful Literary Works Are Achieved Anxieties, Not Releases From Anxieties.

We Read Not Only Because We Cannot Know Enough People, But Because Friendship Is So Vulnerable, So Likely To Diminish Or Disappear, Overcome By Space, Time, Imperfect Sympathies, And All The Sorrows Of Familial And Passional Life.

Read Deeply, Not To Believe, Not To Accept, Not To Contradict, But To Learn To Share In That One Nature That Writes And Reads.

At Our Present Bad Moment, We Need Above All To Recover Our Sense Of Literary Individuality And Of Poetic Autonomy.