Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books

No answer. Event is all. The glimpse is given.

However pronounced, it is a mild syllable, fading off into open silence. All the vowels and consonants of the poem tend toward softness, giving an effect, to my ear, of silvery hush and spaciousness.

How to read a poem is aloud.

What is it the child perceives that her whole culture denies?

Perhaps we give animal stories to children and encourage their interest in animals because we see children as inferior, mentally “primitive,” not yet fully human: so we see pets and zoos and animal stories as “natural” steps on the child’s way up to adult, exclusive humanity—rungs

The general purpose of a myth is to tell us who we are—who we are as a people. Mythic narrative affirms our community and our responsibilities, and is told in the form of teaching-stories both to children and adults.

I think Borges is quite correct, all prose is fiction.

I’ve spent a good deal of vehemence objecting to the reduction of fiction to ideas.

because they fulfill the most ancient, urgent function of words: to form for us “mental representations of things not actually present,” so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.