[Glenn Wright]

I enjoyed reading these musings on literary achievement, Jim..
In the first paragraph, I was at first jarred by the shift from spa to graveyard and back to spa, but I suspect that this was deliberate. Acclaim is very soothing—dangerously so to anyone wanting to master the craft of writing. In your brief excursion to the graveyard, I imagined the edges of the cemetery lined with skeletons of those writers whose work did not merit dignified burial and laudatory epitaphs. In returning to the spa, you almost drift away into a reverie about Thailand until you pull yourself back with, “But I digress.”
The last paragraph made me think seriously about how important context can be to our appreciation of good writing, even though it shouldn’t be. Something that we read that we found quoted by a Nobel Prize winner certainly can’t help but carry a gloss of excellence that it might not have if he same piece of writing were turned in to us as an eleventh grade essay. Things we read because they were recommended to us by people whose judgment we respect have an unfair advantage in being evaluated that, ideally, they should not have. Conversely, we are affected as writers by the things we read. Is it wise to protect yourself from contamination by inferior writers, only reading those things that come with sterling recommendations? Or should we, as Milton says in “Areopagitica,” read “promiscuously?”