Which would you rather be if you had the choice--divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple-universe.
Which would you rather be. . . divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?
This is a glorious biography. . . The time is ripe for a new biography of Edith Wharton of this intimacy and on this scale. . . Lee the biographer pursues her subject down every winding corridor, into every hidden passage and dark corner. . . Her critical exploration of Edith Whartons work is dazzlingly assured. . . A feat of exhaustive research, and finely tuned to Whartons creative achievement at the same time. . . [Wharton] could scarcely have failed to be impressed by. . . its artistic sympathy, its sonorous depths, and its soaring conception.
What a dazzlingly generous, gloriously unpredictable book! Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating. She invites us to 'pay homage to the transitive' and enjoy 'a becoming in which one never becomes. ' Reading The Argonauts made me happier and freer.
