Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
“I’m filled with the sadness that afflicted the Roman patricians of the fourth century: I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth. …I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.”
Gustave Flaubert | in a letter to Ivan Turgenev