We love the plays, the great characters, the fabulous speeches, the witty repartee even in times of duress. I hope never to be mortally stabbed, but if I am, I'd sure like to have the self-possession,...
Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barriers.
We accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
Education is mostly about institutions and getting tickets stamped; learning is what we do for ourselves. When we're lucky, they go together. If I had to choose, I'd take learning.
Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the nov...
Reading...is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources.
The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, visions of ourselves that we would never see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuri...
The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and...
And romance is just the place for creating mythic figures doing mythic things. Like carving 'civilzation' out of the wilderness. Like showing us what a hero looks life, a real, American, sprung-from-t...
So what did you think the devil would look like? If he were red with a tail, horns, and cloven hooves, any fool could say no.
His argument runs like this: there is no goodness without free will. Without the ability to freely choose-or reject-the good, an individual possesses no control over his own soul, and without that con...
Compelled belief is no belief at all.
Whenever people eat or drink together, it's communion.
History is story, too.
Every novel is brand-new. It’s never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it’s merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—si...
In Eudora Welty’s masterful story Why I Live at the P.O. (1941), the narrator is engaged in a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, who has come home after leaving under suspicious if not actually...
Going After Cacciato
Everywhere you look, the ground is already camped on. So you sigh and pitch your tent where you can, knowing someone else has been there before.
Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.
If to get to the finish line the hero must walk over a sea of bodies, then so be it. He can die at said line, but he's got to get there.
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