money-makers,

xperience doesnot add up to Idea.

epistolary novels

ise and fall in the estimation of visitors, for no apparentreason. Who reads Arnold Bennett now, or Sinclair Lewis?

City of Invention.

Literature stands at the gates of civilization, holding back greed, rage, murder, and savagery ofall kinds?' I

two and twos of life together,

e morewonderful will be the star-studded canopy of experience beneath which you,

burns Emma. No one would dare.

McDonald's around one corner and An American Werewolf inLondon

roperly formulated vision

Of course one dreads it: of course it is overwhelming: one bothanticipates and fears the kind of swooning, almost erotic pleasure that a good passage in a goodbook gives; as something nameless happens.

light the barbecues,

enlighten.

they do not suggest that he or she should reflect, letalone change.

How can I hope to explain Literature to you, with its capital 'L'? You are bright enough.You could read when you were four. But then, sensibly, you turned to television for your windowon the world: you slaked your appetite for information, for stories, for beginnings, middles andends, with the easy tasty substances of the screen in the living room, and (if I remember yourmother rightly) no doubt in your bedroom too. You lulled yourself to sleep with visions ofviolence, and the cruder strokes of human action and reaction; stories in which every simpleaction has a simple motive, nothing is inexplicable, and even God moves in an un-mysteriousway. And now you realize this is not enough: you have an inkling there is something more, thatyour own feelings and responses are a thousand times more complex than this tinny televisualrepresentation of reality has ever suggested: you have, I suspect and hope, intimations of infinity,of the romance of creation, of the wonder of love, of the glory of existence; you look around forcompanions in your wild new comprehension, your sudden vision, and you see the same zonkedout stares, the same pale faces and dyed cotton-wool hair, and you turn, at last, to education, toliterature, and books – and find them closed to you.

.