Longinus: on the sublime

Part 1
Most reality isn't comfortable and needs constant adjustment.

Part 2
One of the best bookstores in the world doesn't have the one book you actually need, a book upon which any bookstore should build its collection, a text fundamental to western civilization.

Yes, the bookstore has stocked the book "at times," in the past, but the book appears now to be out of stock, unless it's in The Blue Room, Aisle 200a with the Greek Classics.

Part 3
Often it appears the world is run by young men who wear their baseball caps backwards and young women with hieroglyphic tattoos and advanced degrees from Ivy League schools.

The young woman at the information desk at the bookstore where I seek "On the Sublime" has never heard of Longinus.

Admittedly, no one's sure that Longinus actually wrote, "On the Sublime." The essay is thought to have been written in the 1st century AD as a corrective to a lost work by a certain Celilius, a friend of Dionysius of Halicarnassas. The oldest extant version, the tenth-century Paris manuscript, attributes the treatise to Dionysus or Longinus. Scholars say that 20 or so pages are missing from the original.

Part 4
In the Sunday New York Times, Cynthia Ozick says that literature's purpose is to,"light up the least grain of being, to show how it is concretely individual, particularized from any other."