Sublime

the effects of historical knowledge, which shows us the fairly arbitrary choices with which our reality was made. By reminding us of the malleability of the world, it also reminds us of our freedom; as the Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis put it, it is a form of ‘liquid evil’ to believe that there are no alternatives.8

This led him, in 1918, to call for the creation of what he called a “usable past.” Speaking to his contemporaries in an intelligent and vivid essay, he outlined the need for history that creative minds could draw upon. “The present is a void,” he wrote, “and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common

Since almost every word Wolfe wrote was autobiographical, nearly all his characters based closely on real people, there had always been a risk of prosecution.

Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.

“The contemporary man should not find it difficult to play a role in which modern life is casting him. Glued to his movie or television screen, fed his daily dose of scandals, always watching and never acting, he has become a Peeping Tom.”

are endemic or subject to social and political action. Physics has learned that reality is altered by the process of observation. History similarly teaches that men and women shape their environment by their interpretation of it.

We still talk about plot the way Aristotle wrote about it over two thousand years ago, when he argued that plot should be driven by character. When we continue to teach plot this way, we ignore both the many other kinds of plot found in literatures around the world and even the context of Aristotle’s original complaint (he was fed up with the fate/

Weaver warns about “the insolence of material success,” the “technification of the world,” the obliteration of distinctions that make living “strenuously, or romantically” possible. “Presentism,” the effort to begin each day, as Allen Tate put it, as if there were no yesterday, has robbed man of his history and therefore his identity as a moral age

Weaver was “a