Shakespeare Will Not Make Us Better, And

There Is No Method Except Yourself.

The Morality Of Scholarship, As Currently Practiced, Is To Encourage Everyone To Replace Difficult Pleasures By Pleasures Universally Accessible Precisely Because They Are Easier.

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.

At Our Present Bad Moment, We Need Above All To Recover Our Sense Of Literary Individuality And Of Poetic Autonomy.

I Take It That A Successful Therapy Is An Oxymoron.