[people In 1600s] Didn't Have Many Books.

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

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.

There's A Huge Amount Of Work On Adam And Eve, From The Ancient World To The Present. Saint Augustine Was Obsessed With Them.i Don't Know If It Helps My Research, But I Get A Big Kick Out Of Mark Twain, Who Wrote "the Diaries Of Adam And Eve." He Wrote Very Funny Stuff On Them. I Sometimes Read Things That Are Loosely Related To What I'm Thinking And Writing About.

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.

The Greatest Obstacle To Pleasure Is Not Pain; It Is Delusion.