[taosaur]

Originally Posted by Ransom

I shot down all of the following items that you ignorantly claimed were specific to literary fiction.

1. I made no such claim.
2. Your examples were irrelevant to the respective traits I did describe.

Originally Posted by Ransom

It would appear at this juncture that the only thing vague is the worth of your education. Perhaps when you're my age and have spent another thirty years reading something of actual value, we can then have a pleasant conversation. Actually, the one thing anyone over fifty can tell you if they're well-read at all is that you don't need to read a lot of books. You just need to read the right books, and you need to get the right things out of them. There's a singular golden thread that connects the right books, and a person of the right character will see it and follow it through to its logical conclusion. The hints will all be there weaving in and out of both fiction and non-fiction from Homer to Plato to Virgil to Pseudo-Dionysius to Dante, and there the thread intertwines where Helen of Troy; Beatrice; and the Holy Other become one symbol of that which is always sought for but never attained (one wishes Cabell had understood it better), and then on to St. John of the Cross and his "Great Sea"; to Donne and Milton; the uneducated brilliance of Bunyan; the illumination of Novalis; the hard truths of James Hogg; the "feeling intellect" of Wordsworth and "far Ancestral voices" of Coleridge; to Adam's house of slumber in George MacDonald; the all-encompassing head of Sunday in Chesterton's Thursday; to the primordial reality behind the world in "the City" of Charles Williams; and finally resting at the foot of Lewis' cave in Perelandra where Aeneas, Kubla Khan, and Lewis' hero join metaphors. There are dozens of other writers in the meshes adding a little salt here and there as well, but it's here at Lewis' cave that the thread lies buried until another worthy of it picks it back up.

I'll just leave that right there.

Originally Posted by Ransom

It's very doubtful that someone from the LF basement will be the one to continue the line since absolute garbage like Gaiman's American Gods is the norm among the LF crowd—a book I tossed in the can after 80-pages like all reasonable people do.

If American Gods is your idea of a work of contemporary literary fiction, I rest my case. It's urban fantasy, by an unabashedly and exclusively genre author, and not his best work. Whatever phantasms the words "literary fiction" conjure in your mind, it's not what the rest of us are talking about.

Originally Posted by Ransom

And when you're very, very old it may be hoped that you'll at last be able to realize and embrace this sane and simple fact: that reading is all about finding meaningful truths, and the greatest truths of all lie within those faerie tales you left on the nursery room floor. Until then you've got your Greek, your Latin, your German and your French to learn and innumerable connections to make, and when you've discovered the wisdom of Berkeley and Kierkegaard over against the folly of Hume and Schopenhauer, then we may have something to talk about.

There are fields of interest other than philosophy (or really, you seem more concerned with theology), and wonderful authors who are not dead white men.

Also, my formal education ended a decade ago, whereas my reading did not.

And you might enjoy Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, Narcissus and Goldmund and/or Steppenwolf.