You can't be hesitant about who you are.
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmasriddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.
Shakespeare is universal.
The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.
To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.
I'm not an actor who appears on the stage and gives people advice on how to live or what to do and entertains them. It is not my specialty.
The ancients could communicate with the gods in two ways. First, it was (and is) possible to go into a trance and visit the gods in their celestial retreats, as the great shamans have always done. More easily, and less dangerously, they could let the gods speak through code, that is, divination, using dice, entrails, bird patterns, yarrow sticks, cards.
All political spendings for purposes beyond the protection of life and property are a snare and a delusion.