aklinstopia

Literature is to the race what autobiography is to the individual; it is the “Life and Remains of the natural man.”  Literature is more than style, form, and sensibility.  It is the image of man as he moves.  Everywhere we get propositions about him or measurement of him, but here he is half dust, half idea.  The poet who paints the passions well, has not shown us his riches, but ours.  Great literature is about its reader, the man who is always different and who never changes.  The capacity to believe history is the capacity to see many potentialities in men, and to understand that extreme behavior are confined by no providence to the past.  The subject of literature is human possibility, which is not infinite but which is greater than complacency admits.