A, B, C

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The larger point: I am as much the person who makes the mistake as I am the one who corrects it. I am as much the person who gets to the place in a sentence or a paragraph where I realize I am ignorant of a date or the name of a city where some historical event occurred as I am the person who, twenty minutes later, returns from the encyclopedia on the lower library shelf or turns from the computer screen after a ten-minute Google hunt to fill it in. Writing above a certain level requires, however, that you gain some understanding of both, not only within your “self” but out in the world. Perhaps this is what has given me a career-long fascination with people who cannot speak or write at all, as well as an equal fascination with poets (which etymologically means “makers” and more recently “makers of things from language”), though the “self” I present the world is neither one nor the other, thanks to the Other that is always there in me, the “I” that “I” am always struggling to overcome. This is the only way I can resolve the aporia (the contradiction; and aporia was Plato’s word after all) as to why Plato, who was such a fine writer in the Greek of his time, in his hypothetical and optative society so famously excluded the poets from his Republic. Plato wanted the poets who were there to be better than they were, that is, to choose the option to be more faithful to the idea of truth — which, when talking about an imagined world, is not quite the same as actually banishing them from the actual. I am not in the least suggesting, as some folks have, that Plato wrote science fictions. But I do. That helps me read him — as, doubtless, having written one novel himself (Marius the Epicurean, His Sensations and Ideas [1885], a favorite of both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce) and started another (Gaston de la tour), helped Walter Pater, seven years later, in his wonderful Plato and Platonism (1893), have the insights about the philosopher that he did. (Far closer to our day than to Plato’s, Pater noted that, had he been writing in ours, Plato could have been a great novelist.) The ten-volume set of Walter Pater’s complete works — which her father had not allowed in their library when he was alive — was among the first books Woolf bought with her inheritance on her father’s death. And, a favorite of all the young readers of the Oxford Aesthetic Movement of the previous twenty years (and one of the great forbidden books of its age), Marius is among the first books directly alluded to (by Buck Mulligan, on page eight of the Vintage International edition of Ulysses), through its subtitle. Usually such allusions are literary love — though they can also, sometimes, be literary hate. The unconscious, Freud suggested, uses no negatives. Strong emotion is strong emotion. To me, however, this one has the feel of an enthusiasm.