I had already picked up the literary scholar's habit of validating my own experiences—as the reader will have noted—by their correspondence to some literary scene, character, or phrase. For literary people, an experience is authentic only if you can find a literary antecedent.Hat tip: Ian Jackson.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, May 09, 2017
Authentic Experiences
Alvin Kernan, In Plato's Cave (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 36: