I admire Harold Bloom and his scorn for the New Schools of Resentment. I recognise my own motivations to read in his argument that “the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness…. Our common fate is age, sickness, death, oblivion. Our common hope, tenuousContinueContinue reading “List: my lacunae in Bloom’s Western Canon”
Tag Archives: literature
Inspirations from Roberto Calasso
I aspire to write history not like a dry professor, but more like the shimmering mysteries of the past evoked by writers like W.G. Sebald or the sometimes ponderous but often astonishing Roberto Calasso. “There is no essential reason for history to be distinguished from literature,” he writes in the most enigmatic of histories ofContinueContinue reading “Inspirations from Roberto Calasso”
The disappearance of stories from the world
If Snorri Sturlusen had not turned his court poet ear to the old stories among his people, which the Church urged them to forget in favour of just one book, then the stories of Freya and Odin, Loki and Yggdrasill would have disappeared from the world. Yet these stories survived. Their conquerors were followers ofContinueContinue reading “The disappearance of stories from the world”
Reclusive samizdat
To live authentically within the ruins of our culture today, to practise the ritual of writing solemnly, without regard for fame and fortune and the flickering nonsense of panel shows, to be in the world as God’s secretary, meticulous and devoted to something larger than your own life, to live truly to each of theseContinueContinue reading “Reclusive samizdat”