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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. Part four of Tronn Overend’s comments on Adorno and music | Two uncollected personal poems by Roy Fisher, with comments by Peter Robinson | Anthony Rudolf reviews The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn (with an excerpt) | The reascent of Spengler’s Decline by James Gallant | Three new poems by Simon Smith | Tom Lowenstein’s poem To the Muses | Michael Hampton reviews Turner’s Loom | Le meutre: the death of Camus, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Peter Larkin: Extract from Trees the Seed |Anthony Howell on Julian Stannard’s Freeing Up | Wanton and two more poems, by Michael Egan | Alan Wall on Melancholy’s black sun | Paul Cohen parses Words and Lies | Bruce Kinzer on Leslie Stephen and the Metaphysicals | Richard Johnson: The Present Dystopian Paranoia | Nights In and two more new poems by Anthony Howell Dreamt Affections, a sequence by Peter Robinson | Freedom and justice at the Warburg by Peter McCarey | A Brexit Fudge by Alan Macfarlane | The poem’s not in the word by C. F. Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. A downloadable polemic by Sascha Akhtar | Strictly Scrum: Michelene Wandor on the life and work of James Haskell, flanker | Michial Farmer On Elegance | Telling it for ourselves: Simon Collings on the latest cinema news from Africa | Stephen Wade on the Good Soldier and his creator: The Good Writer Hašek | Six prose poems by Scott Thurston | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy, and ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento,’ by Hoyt Rogers | Jonathan Gorvett, In Djibouti with The Angel of Hulme | An Aural Triptych by Daragh Breen | Immanuel Kant and the origin of the dialectic, the second part of Tronn Overend’s essay on Adorno and music | Three bilinguacultural poems by Changming Yuan | The Optician, short fiction by Cecilia Eudave | (a bean) — fiction by Marzia D’Amico | Stories from The Jazz Age by Aidan Semmens | ‘The London Cage’ and three more poems, by Judith Willson | Manifestos for a lost cause: A sequence of poems by Peter Robinson | Seven new poems by Barry Schwabsky | The poetry of social commitment: Poetry Notes by Peter Riley | The poet as essayist, by Alan Wall | On Gathering and Togethering in Medellin by Richard Berengarten | Two songs by Tristram Fane Saunders | What Heroism Feels Like: Fiction by Benjamin Wolfe | Two poems: ‘Inbound’ and one untitled about Ziggy by Nigel Wheale | Iconoclasm and portraiture in recent fiction by Paul Cohen | The Weimar Republic and critical theory: Adorno on modern music. First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems by Johanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. By Ian Seed | Peter Riley probes Laura Riding’s many modes and offers his 2020 list of summer reviews |Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein | Steve Xerri: Ezra Pound’s life in verse — with two more new poems, one featuring Keats | New Poems by Carrie Etter and Anna Forbes | ‘So, Dreams’ and three more poems, by Luke Emmett | Simon Collings wanders Buñuel’s labyrinth of artifice | Matt Hanson on the Romaniotes in America | For Once, a short fiction by Susana Martín Gijón | Four prose poems by Jane Monson | Jesse Glass and the poetry of ‘ouch’, explained: Pain… | Three poems, one very prose-like, by Claire Crowther | Two new poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz | Michelene Wandor reviews a metro-anthology from London’s twin cities | Simon Collings interviews Jeremy Noel-Tod, anthologist of prose poetry | Alan Wall: How we see now. A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form | Simon Perril: Poems from ‘the Slip’ | Michael Blackburn reviews Byatt’s Odd Angel | Christopher Landrum looks through Chris Arnade’s candid camera at America | Nigel Wheale reviews Ian Crockatt’s translations of the Skaldic verse of Orkney | Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia, in a new translation by Peter McCarey | Anna de Noailles: Thirteen poems in versions by Anthony Howell | Meandering through the Belle-Époque with Anthony Howell | Peter Riley‘s Poetry Notes for Summer 2020 | Three collections of prose poetry: 1.Nine haibun by Sheila E. Murphy | 2.Hurt Detail and two more prose poems by Lydia Unsworth | 3.Ten prose poems, five about men. By Mark Russell | The Latest Event in the History of the Novel by Paul Cohen | Life after life: Viduities, an essay by Alan Wall | As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces, by landscape poet Peter Larkin | More delicate, if minor, interconnections. Poetry by Tom Lowenstein | What Peter Knobler discovered out Walking While White in New York City | Alan Wall reviews Ian Sansom’s autopsy of Auden’s September 1, 1939 | A few very short fictions by Georgia Wetherall | A Play — for 26 Voices by Alice Notley | Four new poems from Credo, Stephen Wiest‘s new collection | Nigel Wheale on the significance and frailty of Raymond Crump | Ottomania! Matt Hanson reports on three new Turkish titles | Cinema: Simon Collings looks into Andrew Kötting’s Whalebone Box | Gowersby. A new puzzle-fiction by Shukburgh Ashby | The Jinn of Failaka: Reportage byMartin Rosenstock | Five Hung Particles by Iain Britton | Three poems from ‘Sovetica’ by Caroline Clark | It’s about time—Boustrophedon time: Anthony Howell is Against Pound | When words fail: Alan Wall diagnoses Shakespeare’s Dysnarrativia | Olive Custance, Lord Alfred Douglas’s much, much better half. By Ferdi McDermott | Three gardens and a dead man by Khaled Hakim | Poems from The Messenger House by Janet Sutherland | Two new poems by British-Canadian poet Pete Smith | Mob Think: Michael Blackburn reviews Kevin D. Williamson’s Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mobs | Natalia Ginzburg’s On Women. The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. Cioran | Blind man’s fog and other poems by Patrick Williamson | None of us: a poem by Luke Emmett | Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship by Michelene Wandor | Languages: A Ghazal by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Seven more poems by Tom Lowenstein | Five poems from ‘Mattered by Tangents’ by Tim Allen | Anthony Howell: Freewheeling through some post-summer reading | ‘Noise’ and three more new poems by Maria de Araújo | A shelf of new poetry books for summer reviewed by Peter Riley in ‘Poetry Notes’ | Film: Simon Collings on Peter Strickland’s In Fabric | Michelene Wandor reviews Helen Dunmore’s Counting Backwards | Mauritius in three voices, by Emma Park | The hidden virtues of T-units and n-grams, by Davina Allison | Peter McCarey reviews W.D. Jackson’s latest Opus | Seven new poems by poet-ethnographer Tom Lowenstein | Anthony Howell: Empyrean Suite, an afterlife collaboration with Fawzi Karim | Christine Gallant reviews Herb Childress’s book on the life of the Adjunct Prof | The talk of The Dolphin, King’s Cross, as reported by Michael Mahony | Franca Mancinelli: Eight poems from Mala Kruna, in translations by John Taylor | A short question: Who will read short stories? David McVey answers | Eavesdropping on Olmecs: New poems by Jesse Glass | Two new poems by Laura Potts | Simon Collings on existence and its discontents in Capernaum | Peter Riley: Reviews yet more new prose-poetry | Anthony Rudolf remembers Turkish poet, novelist and essayist Moris Farhi | James Gallant sheds new light on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels | Theatre: Third Person Theatre Co., and ‘The Noises’ reviewed by Anthony Howell | A fourth gulp of prose poems from ‘The Dice Cup’ by Max Jacob in a new translation by Ian Seed | Lots more short fiction: A new item by Michael Buckingham Gray and a full half-dozen by Simon Collings | Apollo 17 and the Cartoon Moon: Lunar poetry by James Bullion | Juvenal may be missing his moment: Satire for the millennium by Anthony Howell | Pickle-fingered truffle-snouter: fiction by Robert Fern | April Is the Cruellest Month: London fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Beginning and the End of Art…in Tasmania. By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. | Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century. | Three prose poems by Linda Black,with a concluding note on the form | Simon Collings watches Shoplifters, critically | Tim McGrath: In Keen and Quivering Ratio — Isaac Newton and Emily Dickinson together at last | Daragh Breen: A Boat-Shape of Birds: A sequence of poems | Peter Riley reviews First-Person ‘Identity’ Poems: New collections by Zaffar Kunial and Ishion Hutchinson | Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground reviewed by Michael Hampton | José-Flores Tappy: A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’ | Nick O’Hear: Brexit and the backstop and The tragedy of Brexit | Ian Seed: back in the building with Elvis | Nigel Wheale’s remembrance of ‘11.11.11.18’| Franca Mancinelli: Maria, towards Cartoceto, a memoir | Tamler Sommers’s Gospel of Honour, a review by Christopher Landrum | Typesetters delight: Simon Collings reviews Jane Monson’s British Prose Poetry | In Memoriam: Nigel Foxell by Anthony Rudolf | David Hackbridge Johnson rambles through Tooting | Auld acquaintances: Peter Riley on Barry MacSweeney and John James | ‘Listening to Country Music’ and more new poems by Kelvin Corcoran | Latest translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup | Claire Crowther: four poems from her forthcoming ‘Solar Cruise’| Anthony Howell on the lofty guardians of the new palace | War and the memory of war, a reflection by Jerry Palmer | The ‘true surrealist attentiveness’ of Ian Seed’s prose poems, reviewed by Jeremy Over | Antony Rowland: Three place-poems, a response to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë | New fiction by Gabi Reigh | Simon Collings reviews ‘Faces Places’ by Agnès Varda and JR | Ian Seed’s life-long love of short prose-poems | Michael Buckingham Gray’s extremely short story: ‘A woman’s best friend.’ | Simon Collings’s new fiction: Four short prose pieces | Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s Eyes’ were his shaping spirits | Anthony Rudolf remembers poet and broadcaster Keith Bosley | Michael Hampton on Jeremy David Stock’s ‘Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing’ | Peter O’Brien meets Paulette, Martin Sorrell’s ‘extravagent mystery’ of a mother | Anthony Howell reviews Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory | :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
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Kallic distance.
By MICHIAL FARMER.
I hear you saying, “Hey, the city’s all right”
When you only read about it in books
Spend all your money getting so convinced
That you never even bother to look
— Elvis Costello, “Welcome to the Working Week”
I’VE SEEN DISNEY’S 1953 Peter Pan several dozen times in my life, and since childhood I have been substantially more interested in the parts of the movie set in London than in the parts in the children’s fantasy of Neverland. After the sequence in which Wendy, John, and Michael fly with Peter off Big Ben, the movie becomes substantially less appealing to me. Why, I’ve wondered since I had the words to adequately wonder it, would the Darlings want to leave Edwardian Bloomsbury in favor of this silly world of stereotypical pirates and Indians?
♦
NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, select ‘Full screen (f)’ on the embedded display.
MY FAVORITE AUTHOR in elementary school was Judy Blume. I devoured her novels, beginning with the child-friendly Freckle Juice and continuing into a number that I was probably too young to read and certainly too young to understand. My favorites, though, were the age-appropriate Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing and its sequel, Superfudge. Blume, I believe, updates their chronological setting every decade or so, but the copies I read were set in the 1970s in New York City—hardly the city’s best decade. There’s a passage in one of the books in which Peter, the narrator, explains what to do if you’re mugged. I didn’t know what mugging was, but I knew to take the money out of your wallet rather than handing the whole thing over. I still carry paper money in my wallet, just in case.
In Superfudge, Peter’s father, who works at an advertising agency, gets an opportunity to move to Princeton, New Jersey, for some reason. The adults jump at the opportunity to escape the city that Gerald Ford had recently told to drop dead. Peter is more skeptical, and I was with him: I always preferred Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing to Superfudge.
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I FIRST READ T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” my junior year of high school, and I was hooked immediately. I was especially drawn to its descriptions of the London that the narrator walks through on the way to the tedious party that serves as the main setting:
When I read further in Eliot’s Collected Poems, I discovered the “Preludes” and its even bleaker description:
I say “bleaker,” but the truth is, I didn’t—and don’t—experience them as bleak. They energize me.
♦
I’VE HAD A number of terrible years, but one of the worst was the summer of 2002. I was living alone in rural Georgia, having stayed at college after everyone else went home for the break. I worked nights at a chain hotel about twenty miles away and lived in a shabby apartment built in the 1940s and lacking such luxuries as air-conditioning. (It was 95 degrees during the day and not less than 80 at night.) I was nearly friendless, and I was terribly hung up on a classmate; I slept all morning and puttered about aimlessly in the late afternoon and evening, preparing to go to work for minimum wage at that crummy hotel.
For a few weeks, my boss farmed me out to an even crummier hotel an hour away, which had lost their third-shift regular for some reason. This hotel wasn’t open all night; it closed at 3 a.m., meaning that I only worked half a shift, meaning I only got half a paycheck for those few weeks. (Looking back, it seems clear that I was chosen for this honor because I was the worst employee of the hotel.) I’d drive the deserted highway back through the darkened pine forests at 70 miles per hour, singing along to Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Hits at the top of my lungs. I still think the most poetic lyric in rock history comes from “Thunder Road”: “There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away / They haunt this duty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets.” I’d shout it out to the absent object of my desire as if volume and sincerity could make her love me. On my nights off, I had to keep the same cracked sleep schedule, so I’d be up all night in my hot apartment without television or internet. Instead I’d write my own songs—uniformly desperate and depressing, without any of the poetry of “Thunder Road.”
It was, as I said, among the worst periods of my life—and yet when I look back on it, it’s with fondness. I don’t exactly want to go back there, but I see a pleasurable quality in it that I was totally blind to at the time.
♦
WHAT DO THESE examples have in common? One’s immediate temptation is to say nostalgia, but only the fourth example is, strictly speaking, nostalgia, in the sense that it’s the only one that involves my wanting to return to a Garden of Eden from which time and age have ejected me. And even that is only a partial case of nostalgia, since, as I have said, I don’t want to actually have that time back, and I don’t think it was better than my current life. Nor are these examples connected by what we might call antiquarian feeling, that “Miniver Cheevy” desire to inhabit an earlier, purer era. The Springsteen song and the Blume book are separated from what was then my present reality much more by space than by time, and at any rate none of them really denigrate my own reality in the way that antiquarian feeling tends to do. What’s more, the things I’m drawn to—the tedium and helplessness of the Darlings’ life in their Bloomsbury nursery; the muggers of Manhattan; the air pollution of World War I-era London; the forgotten beaches and stagflation of Springsteen’s New Jersey; my own loneliness and despair—are scarcely presented to me as beautiful and desirable things, as the Middle Ages are to poor Miniver Cheevy. My attraction to them is, quite literally, ill-advised.
Kallic distance is a sort of misreading—more unconscious than willful—of an artist’s intentions, such as when that which she meant to be a critique reads as praise instead.
I’m tempted to call this phenomenon aesthetic distance, except that that term already exists and refers to a work’s ability or inability to draw a person into its world. What I am talking about is in some respects the opposite of aesthetic distance: if I am drawn into the world of Peter Pan or “Thunder Road,” it’s in a way that’s not sanctioned by their creators. Let’s call it kallic distance instead, from the Greek word for beauty. Kallic distance is a sort of misreading—more unconscious than willful—of an artist’s intentions, such that what she meant to be a critique reads as praise instead. The process is made possible by a sort of inexperience on the reader’s part, whether due to geography or chronology: because I’m not subject to the limitations of a Bloomsbury childhood, the Darlings’ nursery becomes its own sort of Neverland for me. Or more accurately, the process is made possible by a sort of overexperience on the artist’s part, an overfamiliarity that can only breed contempt. This imbalance of experience results in new vistas opening up to the reader: because my view of London can never be Eliot’s, the yellow smog he figures as a rutting tomcat has a soft, romantic valence for me. Because there was no chance of my being mugged in my quiet Atlanta suburb, the prospect did not worry me but excited me—I didn’t exactly want to be mugged, but if I were, it would mean I would be enjoying the features of urban life Peter took for granted: walking to the movies, having a doorman, riding in an elevator.
♦
Peter Pan the film is built on a misreading of Peter Pan the novel and play, which I then misread even further.
Peter Pan is also a strange case because my kallic distance from it is double. The writers and animators who produced the film did not have Edwardian childhoods, and so their presentation of that space and time was already distanced from J.M. Barrie’s novel and play. Thus it’s not at all clear to me that they intended for me to despise the nursery, as the Darlings themselves did. (Their distance from Edwardian Bloomsbury was chronologically about the same as mine from the Blume novels, and geographically it was substantially greater.) So Peter Pan the film is built on a misreading of Peter Pan the novel and play, which I then misread even further. I do wonder if my preference for the more realistic sections of the film is the product of my own stunted and concrete imagination, or whether the animators merely failed to make Neverland interesting to someone whose pop culture was so different from their own—but the effect is the same either way.
♦
WHAT DOES KALLIC distance, as a phenomenon, say about human beings and our relations with the world? It’s tempting to say that it proves the truth of that old cliché, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” In other words, the situation we find ourselves in—whatever it might be—will always be somewhat tedious, and other situations, however tedious to those inhabiting them, will always be attractive to us. Human beings, as Blaise Pascal puts it, “do not know that it is the chase, and not the quarry, which they seek” (§139). There’s some truth to this explanation: humanity’s restlessness and insatiability are well-documented and undeniable. But it turns kallic distance into something sheerly subjective—or, more to the point, it turns beauty itself into something sheerly subjective.
I’d prefer, therefore, to see kallic distance as an expression of something that is objectively there in the scenario the artist portrays, the scenario away from which she means to frighten us. In other words, my distance from 1970s Asbury Park or 1910s London allows me to bypass the uglier parts of their milieux and to see a beauty that is actually present, though invisible to the artist, whose familiarity with it blinds her to it. Art, after all, is at least partially about re-presenting the world in such a way that we see it with fresh eyes. The poet in particular re-enchants the quotidian world by turning it 25 or 30 degrees. What the phenomenon of kallic distance suggests is that this process happens more or less without the artist’s permission, even against her will: the mere act of presentation reveals beauty that might otherwise be difficult or impossible to see. But it does not, I repeat, create that beauty, nor does the spectator’s unfamiliarity. It reveals something that most of us are aware of only intermittently, if at all, which is that our world is fairly bursting at the seams with beauty, if we only had the eyes to see it. Or, as a medieval philosopher might put it, beauty is a quality of Being itself.
Kallic distance is not a form of nostalgia, nor of antiquarian feeling, but it does lie at the root of these phenomena, and perhaps it reveals that they are not as nasty or as noxious as they are commonly supposed to be. They are, if used properly, a means of seeing something that is genuinely there—though I hasten to add that they are frequently used improperly. At its world-enchanting best, kallic distance ought to provoke us not to imaginatively escape the dusty and tedious world around us, but to find the beauty in it that we might otherwise be in danger of missing. It ought to encourage us, in other words, to see our own lives as a kind of poem.
♦
Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950. Harcourt Brace, 1967.
Pascal, Blaise. The Works of Blaise Pascal. Black’s Readers Service, 1941.
♦
Michial Farmer is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017) and the translator of Gabriel Marcel’s Thirst (Cluny, forthcoming). His essays have appeared in Front Porch Republic, PopMatters, and America Magazine. He lives in Atlanta.
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Publication: Sunday, 14 February 2021, at 18:08.
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