my body is a bruise.

The Greek for “divine possession” is enthusiasmos—enthusiasm. To be enthused or enthusiastic is to be “engodded,” to be divinely inspired.

““He staggered a little, unsure whether he should drop to one knee because he’d been shot or because it was the dramatically correct thing to do. He did so anyway, to give himself something to do while he thought about it.””

INTRO TO ARTHURIANA MASTERPOST

When he was badly hurt he had this instinct for solitude. To him, there was something private about death—so that, if he had to die, he tried to get a chance of doing it by himself.

“Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned. Writing is getting comfortable with everything that has already been written—great literature and commercial literature, if useful, the novel-essay and the screenplay—and in turn becoming, within the limits of one’s own dizzying, crowded individuality, something written. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune. (…) Thus in order to devote ourselves to literary work must we subscribe to the great scroll of writing? Yes. Writing inevitably has to reckon with other writing, and it’s from the terrain of the already written that the sentence might jump out that sets in motion a small admirable book or the great book that displays a trajectory and constructs a unique world of words, characters, and conflicts.”