BitterSweetLife

As far as subject matter goes, I've been on a kind of books & writing jag lately, which is a little ironic because I haven't been doing that much real writing. At least not in a creative, reflective sense. My excuse is that end-of-semester projects and final essays have been bearing down hard, and I'm ready to be done with it all.

I'm like Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones movie. He's faced by the gyrating, cocky, martial-arts swordsman, and pauses, knowing that in all fairness he should pull out his whip for a thrilling hand-to-hand combat sequence. Instead, he pulls out his revolver and shoots the guy. Nice to have a secret weapon.

If only I had a revolver to train on my finals, in place of the usual tactics. In the meantime, I'm pursuing a thread I started earlier, When Great Authors Talk About Each Other... Here are a few more of my favorite writers-on-writers quotes:

John Cowper Powys said, “We have no reason for denying to the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, leisurely semi-consciousness.” He may not be right, but I like his adjectives. - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Strong character is required to assert one’s true taste. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein makes a distinction between taste and originality. “Taste,” he says, “can be charming but not gripping.” Taste, in his view, “is refinement of sensitivity: but sensitivity does not do anything, it is purely receptive.” He believed that ‘a great creator has no need of taste; his child is born into the world fully formed.’ (Shakespeare, when you think about it, was weak in the line of taste – thank God.) Taste refines and polishes, but creates nothing. Wittgenstein’s own fear was that, as a thinker, he himself had taste merely. - Joseph Epstein, Snobbery

The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live. - C.S. Lewis, on George MacDonald's Phantastes