There Is No Method Except Yourself.

The World Does Not Get To Be A Better Or A Worse Place; It Just Gets More Senescent.

We Possess The Canon Because We Are Mortal And Also Rather Belated. There Is Only So Much Time, And Time Must Have A Stop, While There Is More To Read Than There Ever Was Before. From The Yahwist And Homer To Freud, Kafka, And Beckett Is A Journey Of Nearly Three Millennia. Since That Voyage Goes Past Harbors As Infinite As Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, And Tolstoy, All Of Whom Amply Compensate A Lifetime's Rereadings, We Are In The Pragmatic Dilemma Of Excluding Something Else Each Time We Read Or Reread Extensively.

I Take It That A Successful Therapy Is An Oxymoron.

One Measures Oncoming Old Age By Its Deepening Of Proust, And Its Deepening By Proust. How To Read A Novel? Lovingly, If It Shows Itself Capable Of Accomodating One's Love; And Jealously, Because It Can Become The Image Of One's Limitations In Time And Space, And Yet Can Give The Proustian Blessing Of More Life.

More Even Than Southern Presbyterians And Southern Methodists, The Baptists Provided The Great Mass Of Confederate Enlisted Men.