Reading John Crowley again. Basically the same reason I real Bulgakov: the possibility of representation. If you are not able to summon the reality of the scent of the pungent orange drink on a summer's afternoon at Patriarch Ponds, the rest is nonsense, and you also will not be able to summon the reality of the religious scenes that follow. The possibility of representation is what the sacraments lead us to, but also the thing that the everyday, mimetic church, in preserving the sacraments, sometimes tends to erase.
Yesterday: v1 of von Balthasar's Aesthetics, skimming most of the second half due to time. At first, I thought Kant, a transcendental aesthetics laying the foundation for the logic to come, basically establishing the possibility of intuition, but Kant to Wolff is not Von B to the deposit of faith. He isn't narrowing the field, but broadening it, sometimes frustratingly. (If you dwell for so long on the romantics and the storm and noise folks, you really do need to contextualize them in relation to the rational Enlightenment against which they were reacting, especially when talking about the possibility of intuition of forms.) But nonetheless, a rewarding read.
When I used to read Crowley, I identified with the characters. Not so much anymore. Actually what prompted the shift was reading the contemporary Russians, esp. Sorokin. To understand the representation, you can't be drawn into it. You must be strong enough to stand above the characters, as opposed to drooling on cue like the experimental dogs in Gravity's Rainbow.