* Note that the playback function may entail lengthy delays where the writer cogitated. We do try to jump to the point at which composing began, but there is the occasional writer who types a letter and then stops for five minutes. Hang in there.

David Lehman

We asked David Lehman to write on the following:

I regret not having taken up the offer of a Cambridge colleague, a pathologist of proven insight and tact, to try LSD under his supervision. Having experienced no such drug, I remain at a loss to imagine, to conceptualise one of the principal agents of ruin and consolation, of desire and annulment at the anarchic heart of our culture. A 'trip' not taken.

-- George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life

QuickMuse recommends: