This report is taken from PN Review 241, Volume 44 Number 5, May - June 2018.
A Few Offhand RemarksA Few More Offhand Remarks About More Than One Overwhelming Literary Giant
- 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.
- 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?
- 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?
- Truly, my darling – if delusion were to be made illegal, what an unimaginably vast amount could legitimately be accumulated in fines!
- But evidently Reality is merely the wrapping-paper round the actual gift.
- We can only hope that the dazzling brilliance of an image does not itself guarantee its fundamental inaccuracy either!
- 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?
- God creates infinite distances because he so greatly wishes to overcome precisely those same infinite distances.
- 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.)
- Unintelligible remarks from a source utterly unknowable by us!
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