'Full of the Little Obscurities'

“A man may profess to understand the President of the United States, but he seldom alleges, even to himself, that he understands his own wife.” 

Anecdotal Evidence attracts an admirably knowledgeable set of readers, mostly proud amateurs like its author. As best I can judge, academics are strangers to the blogosphere in general and this blog in particular. That’s not a complaint. I assume most of my readers, like me, are interested in books, not posturing or theorizing about them, or turning them into political fables. They seek, to varying degrees, wisdom and pleasure, as all grownup readers do. They accept that authors understand more than their critics, even when they understand little or nothing. Part of the pleasure of being alive is relishing the mystery surrounding us.

 

The sentence at the top is characteristic of its author -- shrewd, a tad cynical, definitely more comic than sententious. A seasoned reader might deduce his identity but not who he is writing about. Here he describes the manner of that writer:

 

“[He] always shows us a picture that is full of the little obscurities, the uncertainties of outline, the mysterious shadings-off, that we see in the real world around us. He does not pretend to the traditional omniscience of the novelist. He is not forever translating the unknowable in motive and act into ready formula . . .”

 

No cheating. Who is writing about whom on June 20, 1916?