Reality Is What We Want

We Read Our Mail And Counted Up Our Missions In Bombers Named For Girls, We Burned The Cities We Had Learned About In School Till Our Lives Wore Out; Our Bodies Lay Among The People We Had Killed And Never Seen. When We Lasted Long Enough They Gave Us Medals; When We Died They Said, "our Casualties Were Low." They Said, "here Are The Maps"; We Burned The Cities.

An Intelligent Man Said That The World Felt Napoleon As A Weight, And That When He Died It Would Give A Great Oof Of Relief. This Is Just As True Of Byron, Or Of Such Byrons Of Their Days As Kipling And Hemingway: After A Generation Or Two The World Is Tired Of Being Their Pedestal, Shakes Them Of With An Oof, And Then - Hoisting Onto Its Back A New World-figure - Feels The Penetrating Satisfaction Of Having Made A Mistake All Its Own.

Originality" Is Everyone's Aim, And Novel Techniques Are As Much Prized As New Scientific Discoveries. [t.s.] Eliot States It With Surprising Naïveté: "it Is Exactly As Wasteful For A Poet To Do What Has Been Done Already As For A Biologist To Rediscover Mendel's Discoveries.

Most Works Of Art Are, Necessarily, Bad...; One Suffers Through The Many For The Few.

Goethe Said That The Worst Thing In Art Is Technical Facility Accompanied By Triteness. Many An Artist, Like God, Has Never Needed To Think Twice About Anything. His Works Are The Mad Scene From Giselle , On Ice Skates: He Weeps, Pulls Out His Hair Holding His Wrists Like Lifar And Tells You What Life Is, All At A Gliding Forty Miles An Hour.