We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.