ED CURTIN—Don’t be distracted and tranquilized by digital trivia and all the things you don’t need to know. Attention must be paid to the few essentials, as with the political ones above.
Beyond those, however, and far deeper in a place of epiphanies, are what the extraordinary Roberto Calasso, in Literature and the Gods, calls “absolute literature,” which is knowledge accessed only through literary composition “in search of an absolute, and that thus draws in no less than everything, and at the same time it is something absolutum, unbound, freed from any duty or common cause, from any social utility.” It is writing that one has to read, to enter, whose luminescence vibrates in the mind where a second reality opens up and sends shivers of recognition that ravishes one. It is what Nietzsche said was a place of truth, “a mobile army of metaphors” far beyond normal discourse or conceptual thinking. I mention it because it is essential to experience, a place where art opens the heart and mind to the sublime. Let this digression of mine seem jolting as we skip through what is not worth knowing and what is. Let it seem as enigmatic as it is meant to be. The wars are as much spiritual as physical, a truth certain artists have always known. We are always by the way on the way.
