I'm enjoying packing the gaps in my education. The most productive such packing has occurred via a strange path of cookie crumbs left by the various authors I've read over the years. Henry Miller was probably the messiest author in this respect and left cookie crumbs everywhere: Knut Hamsun, Count Keyserling, Waldo Frank, Oskar Milosz, and countless others. But after many years and many authors, particularly those writing in the time between Goethe and Yeats, all roads seemed to meander their way towards Swedenborg. This old conclusion was recently brought to the surface by a mention of Swedenborg in a short piece by the Russian author Samuel Lurie, which unfortunately I could only read via Google translate--a very coarse blade for fine art.
So now I'm engaged in a long put-off reading of Emanuel Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia, which is where Swedenborg packs the gaps in the Holy Bible. It's fascinating reading but after a few hours my brain begins to feel like it's been squeezed through a jock strap and all that's left are the bad memories. That's when you declare that tomorrow's going to be a brighter day and shift gears to something less elucidatory and more visceral--in my case, ripping out overgrown blackberry vines by the roots and perforating my fingers in spite of thick gloves. It hurts, but I know the trick, which is not minding that it hurts.
Swedenborg or bust!