We Read To Find Ourselves, More Fully

Reading The Very Best Writers—let Us Say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is Not Going To Make Us Better Citizens. Art Is Perfectly Useless, According To The Sublime Oscar Wilde, Who Was Right About Everything. He Also Told Us That All Bad Poetry Is Sincere. Had I The Power To Do So, I Would Command That These Words Be Engraved Above Every Gate At Every University, So That Each Student Might Ponder The Splendor Of The Insight.

What Is Supposed To Be The Very Essence Of Judaism - Which Is The Notion That It Is By Study That You Make Yourself A Holy People - Is Nowhere Present In Hebrew Tradition Before The End Of The First Or The Beginning Of The Second Century Of The Common Era.

What I Think I Have In Common With The School Of Deconstruction Is The Mode Of Negative Thinking Or Negative Awareness, In The Technical, Philosophical Sense Of The Negative, But Which Comes To Me Through Negative Theology.

The Second, And I Think This Is The Much More Overt And I Think It Is The Main Cause, I Have Been Increasingly Demonstrating Or Trying To Demonstrate That Every Possible Stance A Critic, A Scholar, A Teacher Can Take Towards A Poem Is Itself Inevitably And Necessarily Poetic.

I Am Not Unique In My Elegiac Sadness At Watching Reading Die, In The Era That Celebrates Stephen King And J.k. Rowling Rather Than Charles Dickens And Lewis Carroll.