Shaping our Preferences

“For literary judgement, we need to be acutely aware of two things at once: of ‘what we like’ and of ‘what we ought to like’. Few people are honest enough to know either. The first means knowing what we really feel: very few know that....

Authority and Freedom

“Where authority is, freedom is; and where authority is lost , freedom is lost. This holds good for all kinds of authority. Without adults who demand mature behavior, the child is not free to grow up; without teachers to set standards of excellence, the scholar...

To Starve a Child

To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness. Mythology, the voyages through Scylla and Charybdis, down rabbit holes, the turbulent logic of the biblical, the...