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This report is taken from PN Review 241, Volume 44 Number 5, May - June 2018.

A Few Offhand Remarks

A Few More Offhand Remarks About More Than One Overwhelming Literary Giant
Frank Kuppner

  1. A superb fluency and fluidity of image-making carries him off again and again into areas which he himself gets completely lost in. But it never seems to impair the dazzling confidence in his tone of voice.
  2. Yes. If the image is dazzling enough, it will seem to prove any even half-plausible contention or argument that it is attached to. And who can take a proper, closer more critical look while dazzled?
  3. But how much value can there possibly be in the elaboration – be it never so subtly, vividly and brilliantly done – of a view which, in its basic fabric, is quite massively delusional?
  4. Truly, my darling – if delusion were to be made illegal, what an unimaginably vast amount could legitimately be accumulated in fines!
  5. But evidently Reality is merely the wrapping-paper round the actual gift.
  6. We can only hope that the dazzling brilliance of an image does not itself guarantee its fundamental inaccuracy either!
  7. Yes. A single fly out of so many possible. Nonetheless – a fly lands on the Great Pyramid and almost at once start laughing. Indeed. Don’t we all know the feeling?
  8. God creates infinite distances because he so greatly wishes to overcome precisely those same infinite distances.
  9. No, Ada. Nothing we ever say or do – absolutely nothing – has any sort of likeness or similitude to Eternity. (And, if I may so put it, even less to Infinity.)
  10. Unintelligible remarks from a source utterly unknowable by us!
    ...


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