When Faced With Something I Fear, I

I Have Been Fighting Over Commas All My Life.

A Lot Of People Hate Heroes. I Was Criticized For Portraying People Who Are Brave, Honest, Loving, Intelligent. That Was Called Weak And Sentimental. People Who Dismiss All Real Emotion As Sentimentality Are Cowards. They’re Afraid To Commit Themselves, And So They Remain ‘cool’ For The Rest Of Their Lives, Until They’re Dead—then They’re Really Cool.

I Am Religious By Nature, I'm Not A Nihilist. I Don't Follow, I Don't Even Know What The Tenets Of Things Like Deconstructionism Are, And All Those Schools That Come Up And Their Way Of Looking At Things That People Strive To Incorporate Into What They Write. I Don't Even Know What They Are. Because I Sense From A Distance That I Don't Want To Know. And Therefore Even If I Had No Politics, Actual Politics, My Cultural Point Of View Is Hopelessly Out Of Date With The Modern Literary Sensibility. Which Is Nihilistic, And Ironic, Detached, Cool, And Cowardly.

The Shelf Was Filled With Books That Were Hard To Read, That Could Devastate And Remake One's Soul, And That, When They Were Finished, Had A Kick Like A Mule.

Winter Then In Its Early And Clear Stages, Was A Purifying Engine That Ran Unhindered Over City And Country, Alerting The Stars To Sparkle Violently And Shower Their Silver Light Into The Arms Of Bare Upreaching Trees. It Was A Mad And Beautiful Thing That Scoured Raw The Souls Of Animals And Man, Driving Them Before It Until They Loved To Run. And What It Did To Northern Forests Can Hardly Be Described, Considering That It Iced The Branches Of The Sycamores On Chrystie Street And Swept Them Back And Forth Until They Rang Like Ranks Of Bells.