But I Never Listen To Music While

Literate Households In The 17th Century Would Have Had The Bible, John Bunyan's "the Pilgrim's Progress," And A Couple Of Other Books. Shakespeare Plays Were Cheap, So You Could Buy Those, But A Folio Cost A Pound, Which Was An Incredible Amount Of Money Then.

I Believe In Broken, Fractured, Complicated Narratives, But I Believe In Narratives As A Vehicle For Truth, Not Simply As A Form Of Entertainment, Though I Love Entertainment, But Also A Way Of Conveying What Needs To Be Conveyed About The Works That I Care About.

Through Reading Literature We Can Make Ghosts Speak To Us, And We Can Speak Back To Them.

A Comparably Capacious Embrace Of Beauty And Pleasure - An Embrace That Somehow Extends To Death As Well As Life, To Dissolution As Well As Creation - Characterizes Montaigne's Restless Reflections On Matter In Motion, Cervantes's Chronicle Of His Mad Knight, Michelangelo's Depiction Of Flayed Skin, Leonardo's Sketches Of Whirlpools, Caravaggio's Loving Attention To The Dirty Soles Of Christ's Feet.

Poems Are Difficult To Silence.