Best books … chosen by Eric G. Wilson

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake (Dover, $6). This book attacks the ways that we let our fears limit our visions and calls for us to “cleanse the doors of perception” so that we can see everything as it is: “infinite.” This mixture of prose and poetry and satire and apocalypse reminds me always that “without contraries there is no progression” and that “energy is eternal delight.”

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Dover, $5). The greatest novel—no, the greatest book—ever written. We all have within us the whiteness of the whale, that blankness that is both the horror of nothingness and pure possibility. I read it with the faith with which I once read the Bible.

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (Harper Perennial, $15). This novel is about a drunken British consul to Mexico searching for his lost love. The book is the Moby-Dick for our time—a sublime meditation on our longing, always doomed, for ideal beauty. I finished this book for the first time when I was sitting, on almost no sleep, in a park, whose name I don’t remember, in London.

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The Gnostics by Jacques Lacarrière (City Lights, $10). This is a virtual prose poem exploring why we sometimes loathe the way things are and yearn for an eternity beyond all grasping. I often read parts of it in the morning, just before I sit down to write.

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (New Directions, $16). An uncanny dream of the things that are passing and the things that remain behind. The book never fails to remind me of those childhood experiences that made “who I am” and also “who I am not.”

The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson (Harvard, $20). A brilliant intellectual history of our gothic obsessions with artificial humans and also a wondrous meditation on the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft. The book has profoundly influenced my views on the relationship between sadness and machines.