“Otherwise it was black darkness; one breathed darkness.”—D.H. Lawrence, The
Rainbow
When it comes to literary tastes, we’d all do well not to take the opinions of
writers we already
“The great enemy of clear language,” wrote George Orwell in his essay “Politics
and the English Language,” “is insincerity.” Language is being liquidated, sold
off piece by piece, its assets turned over and
The first time I stopped reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest I vowed to
return, but I quietly doubted. I lacked faith. I picked it up because people
whose opinions I valued
Recently some students of mine organized a Lenten social media fast, and asked
me to be a faculty sponsor. Those who gathered at the meeting were few enough to
fit around a small
“I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge,” Annie
Dillard wrote in her luminous Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
> “An anchorite’s hermitage is called an
