Spirits, Poets, and Fools

In mid-November of this year I was in Washington, DC for a conference. It was really a great conference (on The Brothers Karamazov) and one of the things that was nice about it was that we participants were given a few hours downtime in the afternoons. The conference was held at a hotel in Georgetown, so in my time off I’d walk around a bit (it was unseasonably warm and hospitable to perambulation). One thing I did was visit “the Exorcist stairs,” the site of the final scene of the most terrifyi...