he pulled me up into the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot’s description of Orpheus’ gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was some way above the trivial, and in many ways wretched, lives we lived, but what I also learned was that our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in
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