"Except I spent a couple of days in the city and was stuck as always with how dirty and beautiful New York is. The gray light is a song. And graffiti alongside the Amtrak: The rails head north out of Penn Station under the streets, almost as through a tunnel, alongside the passing logos of gangs and solitary hit-artists who use the patches of sunshine that fall into the brief spaces between overpasses, their fat names ballooning into the foreground of their strange works, switched on and off in alternating zones of light and dark. They make the letters of our own alphabet look like foreign ideograms, ignorant, rudely dismissive, also happy: magical bursting stars, spirals, lightning. And I realized that what I first require of a work of art is that its agenda - is that the word I want? - not include me. I don't want its aims put in doubt by an attempt to appeal to me, by any awareness of me at all."

The above passage comes from Johnson's novella "The Name of The World", which I finished reading last night. I was unaware of Johnson's body of work until few weeks ago, the NYT Book Review came out with this gushing, effusive review of Johnson's latest novel "Tree of Smoke" - the reviewer even called him "the revelator" - for shining a strange new light on the Vietnam War. In other words for delineating in wonderful new ways - to employ an Orwellian turn of phrase employed by a prominent member of the current US executive - the current shadows of the future, i.e., Iraq War's backward shadows. And the rest of what I could find on Johnson - this novelist whom I had never heard of before - online¹ was as fulsome with praise as that book review.

So when I wandered into the Strand Bookstore this past week - to smell, and not buy any - I fell for the lines which end the novella (I have this strange habit of reading endings² before I read the beginnings of books), in which the narrator describes his career change from an academic - historian - to a war correspondent covering Gulf War-I:

"I have taken assignments steadily since then. I remain a student of history, more of one that ever, now that our century has torn its way out of its chrysalis and become too beautiful to be examined, too alive to be debated and exploited by played-out intellectuals. The important thing is no longer to predict in what way its grand convolutions might next shake us. Now the important thing is to ride it into the sky."

Now I am waiting to go and buy me some "Tree of Smoke"