Thus Carol Hit Upon The

The Maker Of The Universe With Stars A Hundred Thousand Light-years Apart Was Interested, Furious, And Very Personal About It If A Small Boy Played Baseball On Sunday Afternoon.

A Village In A Country Which Is Taking Pains To Become Altogether Standardized And Pure, Which Aspires To Succeed Victorian England As The Chief Mediocrity Of The World, Is No Longer Merely Provincial, No Longer Downy And Restful In Its Leaf-shadowed Ignorance. It Is A Force Seeking To Conquer The Earth. Sure Of Itself, It Bullies Other Civilizations, As A Traveling Salesman In A Brown Derby Conquers The Wisdom Of China And Tacks Advertisements Of Cigarettes Over Arches For Centuries Dedicated To The Sayings Of Confucius.

Our American Professors Like Their Literature Clear And Cold And Pure And Very Dead.

Every Compulsion Is Put Upon Writers To Become Safe, Polite, Obedient, And Sterile. In Protest, I Declined Election To The National Institute Of Arts And Letters Some Years Ago, And Now I Must Decline The Pulitzer Prize.

Under A Tyranny, Most Friends Are A Liability. One Quarter Of Them Turn "reasonable" And Become Your Enemies, One Quarter Are Afraid To Speak, And One Quarter Are Killed And You Die With Them. But The Blessed Final Quarter Keep You Alive.