Appreciation …

… Reclaiming a Beloved Writer from the Brink of Disappearance | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In recent months I’ve been obsessed again with Horgan, with wanting, again, to understand. I’ve read for the first time his burnished recollections of his friend, Igor Stravinisky: “His hands were like exposed roots in winter, all gnarl and frosty fiber.” I’ve read, again, that devastating kitten scene: “I could remember the hot thin supple body of the kitten under its wet fur, and the pitifully small tube of its neck, and the large clever space between its ears at the back, where all its thoughts seemed to come from, and the perfectly blank look on its wide-eyed face as it strove to escape me and the hurt I was possessed of.”
I’ve turned to his craft book, Approaches to Writing, after writing my own—and been epigrammatically put in my place: “How can the negative ever create?” And “We begin to ‘create’ when we see everyone else as ourselves.” And “Originality for its own sake is always dishonest and thus irrelevant.” And “Every act of art is an act of love.”