Erstwhile Okie on St. Mark's Place. "That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past."
Just exposed to this quote by the physicist Paul Dirac and love it: "the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way." I love obfuscation, hence my obsession with incomprehensible Old Testament stories. I think it gets you closer to truth.
I picked up Charles Baxter's THE FEAST OF LOVE last August at a real low point because a stranger told me it was their favorite book. I always ask people their favorite movie or book and they typically say either that they have lots of favorites (wild how few people know the definition of the word favorite) or else they give some sort of mock-embarrassed shrug and name something popular and trite. But this person said THE FEAST OF LOVE so I bought it and have been reading it in drips and drabs for nearly a year.
It bounces between the perspectives of different ordinary people. It's lovely and moving but wasn't especially engaging. There's a woman who is sleeping with a married man and then starts dating someone else. She ends up marrying the latter but fails to fall out of love with the former so they divorce and she goes back to the married man. It made me irrationally angry, as every affair in a book or movie always does. Which made me wonder why I always relate to the cuckold rather than the lover.
Anyway, it was well done but I doubt I'll give it much thought.
Heck of an opening line.