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2003-07-13 - 8:43 p.m. I'm reading: The Sporting News I'm listening to: Los Lobos Quote O' The Day: Graham Green: The Quiet American: "It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too." Jack Murnighan from Nerve.com: We are the animals with language and the animals that fall in love and it is our glory and our curse to spend our lives trying to use the one to express the other. Milton called words "dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce" and though we would have them pierce, too often they thud or hobble. It often surprises me that the study of literature has any objective other than to find the most piercing, beautiful, elegant expressions of the fundamental joys and problems of human existence. We are all of us always lacking the right words, and literature is one of the few places where we sometimes find them. Great books are great because they scribble down what most of us wish we could say but probably will never be able to. Literature should be studied not for its history, but for its impact it has on the living present, and it can only do that if the books we teach still have currency in the quotidian realities of students. No book is great in a vacuum, but only for whatever beauty, poignancy and vitality it contains that can be made to make sense to the contemporary reader. We should read Beowulf, for example, not because it is among the earliest works in English, but to find lines like: "Now, for a time, you find glory in your strength, yet soon sickness or sword shall diminish it, or fire's fangs, or flood's surge, or sword's swing or spear's flight, or appalling age; brightness of eyes will fail and grow dark; then death shall overcome you, warrior." Now that's pathos! � 
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