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I don't like to reread things and have undergone some pretty thorough changes of mindset in the last few years, but these are the works that I loved best as I read them:

Shelley's poems, of which the best are the verse play Prometheus Unbound, the middle-length constellation of The Triumph of Life, Adonais, The Witch of Atlas and Epipsychidion, and a horde of lyrics: Ode to the West Wind, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, The Cloud, The Two Spirits etc.; if I had to single out two, not necessarily as best but as favorites, I'd pick The Witch of Atlas and The Cloud. Parts of his epic Laon and Cythna AKA The Revolt of Islam are amazing. There's some essays like A Defense of Poetry and On a Future State that match his best verse.

War and Peace, Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's short stories and novellas, especially the Childhood trilogy, A Snowstorm, The Cossacks, The Kreutzer Sonata, Family Happiness.

Ibsen's plays, especially Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, Love's Comedy, Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, When We Dead Awaken.

Those three are my favorites and I recommend every word they ever wrote. The next three:

Remembrance of Things Past AKA In Search of Lost Time, by Proust.

The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser. Also his Epithalamion, Muioptomos, Prothalamion, some of his Amoretti sonnets.

Goethe's Faust, the Wilhelm Meister books, plays, poetry etc. Another author you read as an author and not a selection of masterpieces though.

Other works have meant a lot to me at the time but who knows if they would now? I pick things up again sometimes and they're just ash. But maybe that's just in my eye or in the day. Some:

The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal. Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, various novellas and stories by D.H. Lawrence. Kafka. Robert Browning's poems. Middlemarch. Bleak House. Some obscure Germans writing across genres: Eduard Morike, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Friedrich Holderlin, Georg Buchner. Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Thomas Mann. Borges. Turgenev I loved early, it was he that removed my reservations about literature.

Tons of poetry, of course: I started with Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, with Pushkin and Byron, with the English Renaissance poets and dramatists; moved on through the Romantic and Victorian poets, who as a group I still prefer (especially the better poems of Wordsworth and Tennyson, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Algernon Charles Swinburne); through translated verse from Europe and elsewhere -- liking particularly Luis Cernuda, Antonio Machado, Michelangelo (in the right translations), Anna Akhmatova, Victor Hugo. Most recently have been obsessively reading the better American poets, especially Dickinson, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop... some Edwin Arlington Robinson, Emerson, Stevens, Melville. Went through a World War I British poets kick, liking Owen best, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke also.

Some books affect me powerfully but make me uneasy. But anything that can get to you through reservations is especially impressive. Dante, Leopardi, Kleist's Prince of Homburg. Flaubert's Sentimental Education (which hurt)... I get this especially with the better early 20th Century poets: Rilke, Lorca, Neruda, Montale, Yeats. This is something of my attitude to Blake... I actually like him a lot but he's too much work to wrestle with. Milton also absorbs your whole being for a couple weeks while reading him, but is very much worth it.

Strindberg and Dostoevsky are painfully, amusingly, brilliantly insane.

I've been on lots of kicks of course, whole months where I could only read one author. As a teenager I had a Camus phase, a Hemingway phase.

What's left? The only Metaphysical poet I can stand is Marvell, and he only shines bright in a couple poems. My especial dislikes are Chaucer, Hopkins, Samuel Beckett and Hardy (these two more for outlook than subject matter or manner) and most of the Bible. I have a moderate aversion to anything Medieval and a mild one to the 18th century.

There's a lot of books I can't seem to get through despite multiple sustained attempts, notably The Iliad, Don Quixote, The Republic, Ulysses & Finnegans Wake, Moby-Dick. I like all of them, have read other works by their authors, mean to finish them.

I'm not as knowedgable about philosophy, I mostly read -about- the famous philosophers. Exceptions are Plato and Bertrand Russell. Nietzsche is fun to read around in, though often another "Strindoevsky." Among essayists I like what I've read of Montaigne and Emerson.

I'm widest-read in the dramatic classics. My favorite Shakespeare plays are Love's Labor's Lost, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, A Winter's Tale; though this list shifts a lot. I like French drama but to me it feels like light reading: Moliere, Racine, Marivaux, Musset. I worshipped Shaw once and still like him. The British comedy tradition in general is superb. My favorite Greek is of course Sophocles. When it isn't Aeschylus.

I love Keats while reading him but hate him for eclipsing Shelley in reputation. Shelley just -eats- Keats whenever he wanders into Keatsian subject matter. Tolstoy seems to have similar invasive abilities: 90% of Flaubert, 50% of Stendhal, 50% of George Eliot, stray chunks of Balzac and Hugo, almost all of Turgenev, all are digested and effortlessly transcended in Anna Karenina.

Enough dizzying lists for now. I'll check back over this sometime, I must be forgetting a hundred things.

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How little we do or say that doesn't slander our potential.

The difference between being familiar with a fact or line and having memorized it. That click. Good habits, excellent ideas, purged personalities, all wash away unless sunk in to the clicking point. If only the click were audible.

The question is a neat concept. There's assumptions you make in even asking it, and an unknown you're admitting ignorance of, though there also tend to be suspicions projected, one or more shadow answers. And then of course there's a shadow answerer summoned, a questionee. Very efficient, conceptually.

Who am I?

You've declared that you are, admitted you don't know what you are, limited the answer to the shadow subset 'people,' and summoned up an answerer out of sky and neighbors. Who may not answer, but is still an answerer. All in three words and a leaky upside-down hook.

I am a postman.

How bland in comparison. The imagination loves a drama and hates a plaque. And it's the imagination that's of interest, the soft and runny part of the mind. It staunches holes, builds bridges. The stuff takes any form and can be hardened forever with the right magic word.

I think I'll use mine to make the water outside, the air inside, the city the inside of the outside and the wilderness the outside of the inside. I like my wildernesses wet.

The sun could drift about in and out. We'd have to dim it. And put it in a bubble. Passages from the inside of the outside to the outside of the inside would be large and lined with zinc and would also be forever rainy. I think in the city they will use gigantic potato bugs for cars. And telephones would be really long trumpets that knocked you out giving or receiving the message. This would encourage people to only say important things. There would be cushions at both ends to fall onto, I'm good to my people. And every night after your hard day's work mining zinc you'd be assigned a random apartment number by one of those effervescent lottery ball machines. A big one in the park. And you'd go to the apartment and others would come after and for the night you'd have to figure out a lifestyle using the objects therein and form patterns of relation with the other people that picked the number.

I'm not sure how gravity should work. We'll try making it voluntary at first.

Thoughts decay unless unpacked.

The biggest enemy is the 'of course I know that' attitude. If you can't say it, all of it, right now, to the eventual comprehension if not satisfaction of any hearer; if the 'it' you -can- say isn't more than a mere feeling, a sense of accuracy made of cardboard covering a hole; if you don't have continuity of trust, however protected, with all other people, an ability to tell them who you are and what you fear and where you tend to crumble, and to hear and accept their every idea and affect as something potentially yours also; then whatever you have you won't retain.

Comfort is the enemy. Or rather, any integrity based on silence.

Maybe I'll accept we all need to hide some things. Just maybe. But you'd better understand exactly what you're blacking out and why.

There has to be free passage in and out. No more dead leaves reefing-in the source.

I hate it, this place between opinions. This isn't me.

***

Art was invented to distract people from talking about art.

Stray words from Julie:

"They were clearly sleeping with each other to get ahead."

"He's the epitome of redundancy."

Also in giving her class presentation on a child killer she ended the chalkboard timeline of his life with a little hangman.

...meaning things she didn't mean to mean...

I'm not a liar but I do have a tendency to assume false expressions and pseudopersonalities during conversation. I take a step in one direction or another from what I actually mean, or pick a pattern of reaction randomly when I mean nothing at all. I don't do this from boredom, if I'm bored I just want the exchange to be over and go minimal. It's mostly curiosity I think. I know what someone will do if we go forward the way they plan (and everyone has a plan in a conversation, if changed momently), but what if I did... this... or said... that? I like when it goes somewhere new. Though people get simple again when they're too far from home, the basic defenses spring up. But sometimes, for just a second, you get a glimpse inside, a crack opens up between the control mask and the defense mask. Here's where you see how strange people are, strange but simple. There's only a thing or two going on in the average mind at a given time. Life is an ocean where the mind's mere handful of urges are divided, dispersed, reorganized upon emerging.

Self-confidence and curiosity return at the damnedest times. The world chasing you down an enormous infinite hall suddenly stops and you turn around and, impossibly, with a finger, roll it.

When thwarted complete your action otherwise, as if you'd meant to all along. Forget, in fact, you hadn't. Wake proud. Repeat.

**********

Even past the sky you can only wear what fits you.

**********

The garden and gulch regard one another always with a certain sad nostalgia.

Strong in his nonexistence, firm and free
The grand one that we might be steps out forth
And up, past and despite small us; while we,
Admiring, yield the future, sky and North.

Man after man shakes eyeballs from his eyes
And drops his moulting-garments in our heap.
Each moment bids another man arise:
Beyond the skin, where just to see's to leap.

First the curving glass, then the temperature, then the melting, then the being caught, then the gentle waves and then, you cannot help it, then you slide.

Put your hand on her cheek and hold it there and you'll come to know what I mean.

We're in the center when the center exists, there's none without us.

But when not, what then. A prayer to your own best nature, but what would that be.

It's something that isn't asked for. You just have it when you do. Though maybe that's the point of asking for it? You see how much you have by hearing your own question, how a question is asked reveals the scope of the lack.

You're a range. Widen the range. As far apart as you can get without tearing at the center.

At what point does eloquence kick back in. That's the huge loss, of interest in eloquence. Feeling the one set of words represents all of it. The true things said in the way that roots them farthest, ties them up against everything else, brings it all in together, sogging it all down to a sense of rightness.

Multiple metaphors all in one line. One should be clean with metaphors, establish them and develop them. Mishmash land is overpeopled with mush.

The sense of doing something important though. That the concepts you speak of and actions you take are solid in space and time, link up and react and cause. Satisfying clicks and a feeling of pressures, of your sense of self butting up against -senses- of other things that arent fluid, that are too important to be lightly reperspectivized or turned away from to some other interest. Things being thick. Everything being food, a nourishing substance, a usable substance, something continuous with what's inside you. A mood where even a desert is a psychic supermarket. Even a crowd. Where instead of disconnected maps and to-do lists and instructions it all masses up. Your understanding of depth permeates all depth, your sense of color blocks in all the colors everywhere. Your inner circle consubstantial with all existing or traceable circles. Absorbing the rules dramatically, remembering, soaking up the power of the public voice, its urgency. Reallocating it based on reason. The important things are -here-, important enough to react to, to -act- on. You say they are over there instead? I say I know why you are wrong. I am a multitude, whenever five of my moments agree. There is the crowd to answer yours.

Maybe the strongest way to be is to make up an us. Not to express royalty or even election, just population: I have been busy with these thoughts in enough ways over enough time that I am legion, I am consensus.

These tiny strings we're tied with. Whatever you don't realize you can question you accept... this is the trouble with the counterculture, that it really is a culture, so many traditions of questioning -this- but not -those-. Do they even question or just hate. Well, 'hate.' Such hostility among groups, none of it meant. Always that fascinating sense that those people may be the right ones, the true ones. That they're invincible. Throwing stones at the diamond-reinforced window to prove something to yourself. Fighting to be a fighter and not to win. I admire but disapprove.

When presented with a choice of flattering and nonflattering ways to take things, take more things. Push till the choice collapses. To avoid this is the third sin. The second is to feel that it's moderated, that there's any buffer -- authorities, your own perceived inalienable inadequacy, the necessity of making x number of dollars by wrunsday -- between you and the answers. Not the questions, the answers. A question is a coffee shop across the park from the answer pond. The first sin is of course malice.

You have returned here again?
After many wanderings.
And what have you learned?
Only one thing.
You have learned what I said you would learn, have you not?
What did you say?
That it is useless to wander. That in your thoughts you never leave home.
Those are two things. Perhaps they are true and perhaps not.
What did you learn, then?
That home also wanders.

And recently she misheard me as saying: "Strangers come back to strange rectal meats."

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