The Essays of Leonard Michaels Book

In the essay 'Writing About Myself' Michaels explains that the problem is not to write merely about himself. I think he mastered that art. I'm biased, so far I've only read Sylvia and the Nachman stories aside from these essays. I feel like I know way too much about Michaels himself, but I don't. This collection of essays was like talking to him. There are some idea, sentences and themes that appear more than once in the various essays and that's what gives the impression to be having a conversation with Michaels. As he explains in the essay about Ravelstein: 'Bellow is aware of the repetitions. It's the way people talk.'

Michael's interest in language and sentences is something that has always attracted me. Being foreign and flirting a lot with the English language, I'm getting more and more obsessed with it myself. In My Yiddish Michaels tackles the musicality of language:

'Ultimately, I believe, meaning has less to do with language than with music, a sensuous flow that becomes language only by default, so to speak, and by degrees. In great fiction and poetry, meaning is always close to music. Writing about a story by Gogol, Nabokov says it goes la, la, do, la la la, etc. The story's meaning is radically musical. I've often had to rewrite a paragraph because the sound was wrong. When at last it seemed right, I discovered'incredibly'the sense was right. Sense follows sound.'

Still in the language sphere, in 'What's a Story?' Michaels explores one of his favorite sentences (this is one that gets mentioned more than once) by Kafka: 'A cage went in search of a bird.'
To which, he comments: 'Literally preposterous, Kafka's whole sentence mimics the action of life, as if there were no other way to seize a certain weird, ultimately inexplicable, institution: The meaning of life is that it stops.'

There is another sentence that Michaels loves and repeats to us, "Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent" of Wittgenstein. Because some things lie too deep for the scummy touch of words.