Monday, October 28, 2019
Out but not down
We're caught in this round of power outages in California. Posting will resume when we have power again.
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If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.
4 comments:
good luck... hope you all are out of range of the flames...
Thanks! We're safe from nature, but at the mercy of an incompetent state. At least for the next couple of months. More to follow on that front soon.
i couldn't believe my eyes, seeing the Vallejo bridge on fire... i used to cross that fairly regularly...
This is all such a pain. Power is still on at our house, but my workplace is thrown into chaos. :/ Hope you're getting along OK.
That Vallejo bridge photo was something else. Am very worried about Sonoma...
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