To Read In The Service Of Any

But In The End, In The End One Is Alone. We Are All Of Us Alone. I Mean I'm Told These Days We Have To Consider Ourselves As Being In Society... But In The End One Knows One Is Alone, That One Lives At The Heart Of A Solitude.

We Possess The Canon Because We Are Mortal And Also Rather Belated. There Is Only So Much Time, And Time Must Have A Stop, While There Is More To Read Than There Ever Was Before. From The Yahwist And Homer To Freud, Kafka, And Beckett Is A Journey Of Nearly Three Millennia. Since That Voyage Goes Past Harbors As Infinite As Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, And Tolstoy, All Of Whom Amply Compensate A Lifetime's Rereadings, We Are In The Pragmatic Dilemma Of Excluding Something Else Each Time We Read Or Reread Extensively.

Personality, In Our Sense, Is A Shakespearean Invention.

Not A Moment Passes These Days Without Fresh Rushes Of Academic Lemmings Off The Cliffs They Proclaim The Political Responsibilities Of The Critic, But Eventually All This Moralizing Will Subside.

I Won't Say He [shakespeare] 'invented' Us, Because Journalists Perpetually Misunderstand Me On That. I'll Put It More Simply: He Contains Us. Our Ways Of Thinking And Feeling-about Ourselves, Those We Love, Those We Hate, Those We Realize Are Hopelessly 'other' To Us-are More Shaped By Shakespeare Than They Are By The Experience Of Our Own Lives.