the book has a writer with an implied reader, consumption goes in one direction, and everything that happens in the book happens in the book. It is hermetic; it contains itself.
Porete’s work is a prime example of mystical writing in the apophatic tradition. Apophasis: the rhetorical strategy of approaching a subject by denying its existence, or denying that it can be described
Down and Out in Paris and London, “A Hanging,” “Shooting an Elephant,” The Road to Wigan Pier, and finally Homage to Catalonia, which ends his novitiate.
I freely confess that it gave me joy and I too heard a paean in it—not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a paean of transcendence, heavenly music
making them hate Shakespeare. What children resent in these soliloquies is precisely their sententiousness—the sound they have of being already memorized from a copybook.
