my ideal had always been

 I couldn't be satisfied with a dissertation that would merely look for relationships in my field of inquiry--

my ideal had always been the gentle emphasis and appeasing flow of a narrative.    Handke Slow 189

For often, in reading and writing, , I had seen the truth of storytelling as a clarity in which one sentence calmly engenders another and in which the truth---the insight that came before the story---is perceptible only as a gentle something in the transitions between sentences.  Moreover, I knew that reason forgets, the imagination never.  190  

Then, in Grillparzer's The Poor Minstrel, I read "I trembled with a longing for unity."  A desire for the One in All was rekindled in me.  For I knew that unity is possible.  Every singled moment of my life hangs together with every other---without intermediate links.  I need only reconstitute that with the help of my imagination.  190  

some of my most favorite lines from Handke