literature

Rather than offering direct lessons about the modern world, literature is an indirect guide to life. There is no simple way in which we can interpret modern politics with Shakespeare, but we will find again and again that he had named so much of what we see today, and that those names are useful companions in the struggle of thought.

Applied literature helps not to decide, but to think, to see, to name, to know, to understand. If we want to know the world we must see it for what it is, not for what we want it to be, believe it ought to be, and not through the lens of our own dispositions and beliefs.