Anecdotal Evidence: `This I Find Unbearable'

Anecdotal Evidence: `This I Find Unbearable'
Excerpt:

You have to admire a reader equipped with sufficient enterprise to find something amusing in so dreary and obnoxious a writer as Jean-Paul Sartre. Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti quotes two characters discussing Hell in the Frenchman’s 1944 one-act No Exit (Huis Clos):

“GARCIN: Are there books here?

“VALET: No.”

The only infernal torment more insidiously cruel would be a library consisting exclusively of L'idiot de la famille and Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. Forty year ago, my professor of 18th-century English literature read aloud in class a characteristically opaque passage from Sartre’s L'étre et le néant devoted to the subject of holes. She tried valiantly not to laugh, but soon all of us were giggling. She and Mike read Sartre in the only spirit I find palatable.

The prospect of a bookless life (or death), however, is genuinely frightening. In 1997, at the age of eighty-eight, William Maxwell published an article in the The New York Times Magazine in which he writes:................