Jon Rappoport: When I was 19, I was reading VERY thick beef stew with major dollops of metaphysical German gravy. Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer, Heidegger. Long-winded? You wanted to stagger from the dining room table before you even got to the first point these guys were making. So when I happened upon DH Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, and his chapter on Edgar Allan Poe, my head lit up like a Christmas tree when I read his opening lines:
“Poe has no truck with Indians or Nature. He makes no bones about Red Brothers and Wigwams.”
BANG.
Lawrence then follows up with: “He is absolutely concerned with the disintegration-processes of his own psyche.”
Out of the blue, I was reading writing I’d never seen before. Without a fraction of a pause, staring at the page, I thought, THIS IS WHAT I WANT.”