Audience of Strangers

Reading Yeats is like standing in a wet winding sheet on a desolate moor with winter coming down through the sky, in the transition between numb immobility and the wind letting you feel you're alive by slicing you open to the core.

I wonder how much of the mediocre fiction I've read has been immesurably improved by the fact that the good writers and poets have gotten to my brain first and tramped it up into a state that better responds to evocation through words--how much writing works because I *want* it to work, because it's so good when it does.