Writing Was Everything

 

I have written before about my love for the late literary critic—extraordinary reader and literary artist in his own right—Alfred Kazin. After years of dithering, I picked up a copy of the Massey lectures he gave at Harvard a few years before he died. It’s a slim volume, almost flawlessly written, contending on every page that “the aim of literature has always been to reconcile us to life by showing that it is not limited to the actual data of existence.”

This is what the best among us understand. The rest is opera.