We Read Not Only Because We Cannot

I Have Read All Of Daniel Aaron's Books, And Admired Them, But In The Americanist I Believe He Has Composed An Intellectual And Social Memoir For Which He Will Be Remembered. His Self-portrait Is Marked By Personal Tact And Admirable Restraint: He Is And Is Not Its Subject. The Americanist Is A Vision Of Otherness: Literary And Academic Friends And Acquaintances, Here And Abroad. Eloquently Phrased And Free Of Nostalgia, It Catches A Lost World That Yet Engendered Much Of Our Own.

What Matters In Literature In The End Is Surely The Idiosyncratic, The Individual, The Flavor Or The Color Of A Particular Human Suffering.

Literature Is Achieved Anxiety.

People Cannot Stand The Saddest Truth I Know About The Very Nature Of Reading And Writing Imaginative Literature, Which Is That Poetry Does Not Teach Us How To Talk To Other People: It Teaches Us How To Talk To Ourselves. What I'm Desperately Trying To Do Is To Get Students To Talk To Themselves As Though They Are Indeed Themselves, And Not Someone Else.

Socrates, In Plato, Formulates Ideas Of Order: The Iliad, Like Shakespeare, Knows That A Violent Disorder Is A Great Order.