In 23 essays published over the last quarter-century, Laurance Wieder considers Homer, Lao-tzu, Valmiki, and Lady Murasaki, medieval Hebrew poems for Yom Kippur and 20th-century American poetry, Orhan Pamuk and Evliya Çelebi, Miguel de Cervantes and Roberto Bolaño, William Blake and John Milton, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Wagner. This caravan of exiles and messiahs, poets and scholars, novelists and travelers, composers and artists transports the written word-that human thing which lasts.