Lee Siegel

I'm writing a book on magic_, I explain, and I'm asked, __eal magic?_ By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. __o_, I answer: __onjuring tricks, not real magic_. Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.

Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read.

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely.

Ever since the romantic comedy-drama 'She's Gotta Have It' antagonized black women and black men in 1986, Spike Lee's films have enjoyed the outrage of various groups.

In urban America, you do not so much meet a romantic partner as inherit the product of someone else's romantic crimes.