Arguing with someone at table last night; then reading Johnson quoting Conrad this morning:
In one of the rare interviews he did, the fiction writer and poet Denis Johnson — who died on Wednesday at 67 — was asked about his craft, and he quoted these lines from Joseph Conrad:
“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.”
To think is not a mere rationalizing. It is hearing, feeling, and seeing.-- Denis Johnson’s Poetic Visions of a Fallen World, The New York Times, 26May2017