I Wasn't Convinced A Shop

Sometimes, Surely, Truth Is Closer To Imagination Or To Intelligence, To Love Than To Fact? To Be Accurate Is Not To Be Right.

Great Literature Is Like Moral Leadership; Everyone Deplores The Lack Of It, But There Is A Tendency To Prefer It From The Safely Dead.

In The Circle Where I Was Raised, I Knew Of No One Knowledgeable In The Visual Arts, No One Who Regularly Attended Musical Performances, And Only Two Adults Other Than My Teachers Who Spoke Without Embarrassment Of Poetry And Literature — Both Of These Being Women. As Far As I Can Recall, I Never Heard A Man Refer To A Good Or A Great Book. I Knew No One Who Had Mastered, Or Even Studied, Another Language From Choice. And Our Articulate, Conscious Life Proceeded Without Acknowledgement Of The Preceding Civilisations Which Had Produced It.

The United Nations Emerged As A Temple Of Official Good Intentions, A Place Where Governments Might - Without Abating Their Transgressions - Go To Church; A Place Made Remote - By Agreed Untruth And Procedural Complexity, And By Tedium Itself - From The Risk Of Intense Public Involvement.

Going To Europe, Someone Had Written, Was About As Final As Going To Heaven. A Mystical Passage To Another Life, From Which No-one Returned The Same. Those Returning In Such Ships Were Invincible, For They Had Managed It And Could Reflect Ever After On Anne Hathaway's Cottage Or The Tower Of London With A Confidence That Did Generate At Sydney. There Was Nothing Mythic At Sydney; Momentous Objects, Beings And Events All Occurred Abroad Or In The Elsewhere Of Books.