SUFFUSE BUT FOCUS

the problem of reading as in why bother is the problem of knowledge and its solution is most easily but not best expressed in the maual or catalog of goods on sale ... more profoundly and troublesome we get to the novel or biography or book of history where the invitation is to immersion and by a displacement to free the soul from the tyranny of this false particularity that browbeats the mind with thoughts of this far but no further this much but never any more ... thus to float free in another sea of someone else's particulars to hike under that sea the faultlines of another people's submerged tragedy is to come as close as our secular gills can to breathing in the air of the kingdom of heaven ... now who at this point would say too much ... sit down sit down I say ... here look at this map ... do you see these splendid brown colors and these hard ridgelike lines ... that's it ... that's what they are ... these are the carpathians ... but what are even they without a date ... so here take this one ... august 1914 ... and think of franz joseph in vienna mournfully musing