Class began with Mick explaining, at the behest of Mr. Sexson, the architecture for his term paper, a rewritting of the Four Quartets with the Mick stamp upon it. He will be assisted in this endeavor by Northrup Frye's Words with Power, a great book about different metaphors. I don't know about everybody else but I am thourougly intimidated now.

We are to blog about the following things(after reading them, of course):
Walter Pater
Hopkins' poems
Wordsworth--Tintern Abbey
Annie Dillard
Proust--the madeline pastry
St. John of the Cross, who wrote two important works in the history of Christian mysticism, Ascent to Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul. Which ties in ideally, the latter does, with what we discussed today: the dark epiphany. Bright epiphanies can only exist in relation to dark epiphanies, which fill us with fear and despair, and recognition of the fact that nothing matters, since we are all, in the words of Burnt Norton, "distracted from distraction by distraction." And it is when we cease being distracted by the thousands of things that distract us constantly, that we can possibly work toward something else; after kenosis(emptying out, which is a terrifying thing)then we can maybe begin to be filled up again.

Samuel Beckett was a major believer in emptying things down to their bare essential components, and this is why we percieve his work as being so dark and despairing and awful. Until we begin to read it properly. I guess.