What We Think We Are Surely Going

Much Of The Academy On The Humanities Side, English Departments In Particular, No Longer Write What Can Pass For Normal English.

We Are So Placid That The Smallest Tremor Of Objection Is Taken As A Full-scale Revolution.

A Writer Is Dreamed And Transfigured Into Being By Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Silhouettes Of Trees, Boxes Of Fairy Tales Dropped In The Mud, Uncles' And Cousins' Books, Tablets And Capsules And Powders...and Then One Day You Find Yourself Leaning Here, Writing On That Round Glass Table Salvaged From The Park View Pharmacy--writing This, An Impossibility, A Summary Of Who You Came To Be Where You Are Now, And Where, God Knows, Is That?

Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are Not Found To Be Likable. Is Raskolnikov Likable? Is King Lear? The Plethora Of Such Naive Readers Testifies To A Failure Of Imagination - The Capacity To See Into Unfamiliar Lives, Motives, Feelings - And This Failure Must, At Least In Part, Be The Failure Of The Teaching Of Literature In The Schools.

Godlessness Invariably Produces Vulgarity. Civilization Is The Product Of Belief.