It Is The Function Of

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 Are So Placid That The Smallest Tremor Of Objection To Anything At All Is Taken As A Full-scale Revolution. Should Any Soul Speak Up In Favor Of The Obvious, It Is Taken As A Symptom Of The Influence Of The Left, The Right, The Pink, The Black, The Dangerous. An Idea For Its Own Sake - Especially An Obvious Idea - Has No Respectability.

When Something Does Not Insist On Being Noticed, When We Aren't Grabbed By The Collar Or Struck On The Skull By A Presence Or An Event, We Take For Granted The Very Things That Most Deserve Our Gratitude.

Traveling Is Seeing; It Is The Implicit That We Travel By.

What I Felt Then I Feel Now: The Inexorable, Unchanging Interior Hum Of Doubt And Hope.