Mandarin tea …

… From Objective to Subjective - The Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I read Hazzard’s words with a kind of double vision. The values they rest on are still real to me, yet I found in her essays a certain quaintness. At the same time they were tremendously seductive. Surely the seductiveness comes from nostalgia for a more stable cultural landscape. But there is a longing deeper than superficial nostalgia — a longing for trust in reality and the truths of history, trust in the continuity of history and literature, which she, unlike us, would never dream of doubting.