"We all make our nods to the certifiable greats, but don’t we also keep a
smaller shelf, unique, of the writers we feel are our very own—the
writers who somehow got the curtain to part, the distance to collapse,
putting us suddenly there? Whatever there that was, and is. And though
it has been crusted over by the repetitions of habit and rendered so
rare as to feel almost extinct by the incessant manufacture of rhetoric
and solicitation, some vestige of the real, Gerard Manley Hopkins’
“dearest freshness,” does survive. When I find it, I am finally brought
to myself"
A fantastic post about fiction by Sven Birkets
