Writers and that touch of the Universe and Everything about them

Writers have  that touch of Life, the Universe and Everything about then, as they push the fuzzy boundaries of their  academic discipline or auto didact assertions to cosmic proportions.

Writers too often appear to be thinking relaxedly out loud, with a touch too much assurance,  especially those who are doggedly encyclopedic,  in their bubble they are assured that there is no one around to shut them up.

Writers do not on the whole take kindly to theorists, rather as shamans do not always look with favour on anthropologists. A lot of poets and novelists are natural-born romantics about their own art, if sometimes about little else. Even the grittiest realist can turn out to be a closet transcendentalist when it comes to his or her own psyche; and writers like that are affronted by the claim that the fruits of their inspiration can be rationally analysed.

Art, after all, has a good deal in common with religious belief, even in the most agnostic of environments. Both are symbolic forms; both distil some of the fundamental meanings of a community; both work by sign, ritual and sensuous evocation. Both aim to edify, inspire and console, as well as to confront a depth of human despair or depravity which they can nonetheless redeem by form or grace. 

Each requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and each links the most intense inwardness to the most unabashedly cosmic of questions.