The best of times and the worst of times
There is a similarity in my writing to the works of various artists in the last century: Picasso's revolutionary paintings, T.S. Eliot's verse with its strange juxtapositions and odd perspectives, Igor Stravinsky’s music and its clashing sounds. Even if one accepts these similarities, readers may find that their natural reaction to my work is to want to throw it into the dustbin of autobiographical history.
I would anticipate this response given the conventional, the natural, reaction to literary works of this type on the part of many a student I have taught and got to know over the years. The desire for an orderly impulse, a simple, an exciting, narrative sequence may produce in many readers of my work an initial discomfort due to their perception of what they see as my disorder and complexity as well as the sheer length of my work. In this autobiography, as Henry James once put it, “nothing is my last word on anything.” This disorder, this complexity, therefore, could continue for such readers almost indefinitely, at least theoretically. " My life and times, were, as Charles Dickens once said, "the best of times and the worst of times."(1)
In my more than thirty years of teaching I came across hundreds of students whom I know would take little to no delight in an analysis of these times in a form like the one found in my writing.-(1) Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
