With the help of their wings they could fly away to distant regions, blessed
regions, where they really had their homes, for here they were but alien
sojourners. -Soren Kierkegaard
The great temptation
“The gospel, too, is carnival,” said the Russian literary critic Mikhail
Bakhtin. The carnival “was the victory of laughter over fear that most impressed
medieval man,” and “[F]or the medieval parodist everything
David Foster Wallace was somehow able to crawl into the synapses of the American
psyche.
And, terrifyingly, he was able to write about it. No one of his generation was
more able to
“To be brave, knowing beforehand that you’ll be defeated, and to go out and
fight: that’s literature.” —Roberto Bolaño
Some years ago, while flipping through a British literary magazine, I did
“What is in your mind?”~ C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
On some ancient and melancholy eve in Athens, as the pomegranate sun began its
ritual descent into the briny old sea
