I Read In Order To Write. I

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

After A Certain Number Of Years, Our Faces Become Our Biographies.

Dedication To One's Work In The World Is The Only Possible Sanctifica-tion. Religion In All Its Forms Is Dedication To Someone Else's Work, Not Yours.

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.

We Have Had, Alas, And Still Have, The Doubtful Habit Of Reverence. Above All, We Respect Things As They Are.