sink into the sky, swim among the stars

Jensen with his long hair is just Post-Cannon Dean to me.

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.

@cinderellarhea thank you for so precisely articulating what's been bothering me about this!!! yeah that's it!!! he didn't know what was real and he was fighting so hard to believe it was real and it mattered, and then chuck took everyone else away, which is a pretty goddamn good argument for "nothing is real." and then they beat chuck and jack fixed everything, right? except chuck crying in the dirt and jack bringing the people back isn't actually evidence of anything. it's definitely not concrete evidence of reality. so even if dean got through all that and decided yes, this is real, they are free, everything is totally fine and cool now...well for one cas didn't come back. dean demanded chuck bring cas back and that never happened. and even if cas had come back, dean died anyway. he died and when he woke up bobby was there in a rocking chair to hand him an el sol and say "everything is great!"

Private Equity: Pestilence (they are parasites that voraciously strip the value out of a healthy business until it withers and dies)

Workforce Optimization: Famine (cutting hours and employees until the business is starved of staff, barely functioning)

She makes me ill