I tend to think of Atwood as a purveyor of homilies. Even if this is true, truth and judgment may keep their distance from each other.
Sentimentality is a crime, but then Thomas Hardy was a sentimentalist. There's no sense in absurdity - what sense do we make, then, of Kafka's fictions? Obscurity and verbosity defeat the very purpose of literature, so too Henry James defeats the very purpose of literature.
I admire the elegance of the following poem, its economy, its restraint.
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Faster
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Walking was not fast enough, so we ran.
Running was not fast enough, so we galloped.
Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed.
Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled
merrily along on the long metal tracks. Long
metal tracks were not fast enough, so we
drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.
Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for
us. We want to get there faster. But where?
Wherever we are not. But a human soul can
only go as fast a man can walk, they used
to say. In that case, where are all the souls?
Left behind. They wander here and there,
slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at
night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast
enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them,
they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so
fast: our souls don't weigh us down.
-- Margaret Atwood
