He would furiously lead anti-war marches weekly on our courthouse steps. He improvised chants and picket lines in key Lancaster spots for maximum visibility…Soon he began to organize and conduct clandestine parties with bands and full-on amateur boxing bouts in obscure downtown rooms, rural homes and barns. He posed many local dignitaries against each other brawling with full pads on in the ring (often for his own comic purposes). They were brilliant extravaganzas for the aware.

Goethe and Tagore, separated by time and contexts, but joined in their great felicity over the literary idiom, show similar quests in the understanding of the sciences. It is alluring to jump to the conclusion of a phony and fashionable unity; that science and arts are the same after all; and literature, music, mathematics, and the physical sciences are all manifestations of the common muse.

Through this dark canopy of industrialism, greed and pollution certain small punctures have allowed minute shafts of light to shine on our cowering selves. Henry Miller is one of these rays of light.

To sum up in a phrase the true and deepest character of Lawrence’s genius, it was given by his close friend Aldous Huxley in an introduction to the first collected letters shortly after his death: he was a mystical materialist. And thereon hangs the tale I shall unfold.

The notion of Art’s secular epiphany takes us to Vladimir Nabokov, a reader of Joyce. As I recall, it was about 1956 or so that an excerpt of his then unpublishable LOLITA appeared in an early number of Anchor Review.

R.K. Narayan

Narayan’s fiction rarely addresses political issues or high philosophy. He writes with grace and humor, about a fictional town Malgudi and its inhabitants; and their little lives. Narayan is a classic teller of tales; an enduring appeal springs from his canvas where common men and women of all times and places are joined [...]

Paul Auster is a writer, who like Beckett is obsessed with identity and the way it is constructed out of and through the medium of stories, words, or even the thinnest of airs.

Other writers such as Geoff Dyer and Alain de Botton have also established themselves as exponents of a similar type of hybrid writing style. Yet they are more obviously producing non-fiction and neither has written anything to rival Austerlitz, the best of Sebald’s work.

From that first tingling in bed to calling 911 was an hour and a half. Sudden onset, they call it.

I knew it occurred every Autumn. And every Autumn I intended to go. And after many trials and as many errors, I finally made it one August. It was the festival of the earth.