Well then! Wagner was a revolutionary--he fled the Germans.... As an artist one has no home in Europe outside Paris: the délicate...sse in all five artistic senses that is presupposed by Wagner's art, the fingers for nuances, the psychological morbidity are found only in Paris. Nowhere else is this passion in questions of form to be found, this seriousness in mise en scène--which is Parisian seriousness par excellence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at i...ts inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you have ever watched an artist constructing with bits of cold stone a beautiful living picture you know that he works faithful...ly and carefully on the pattern from the wrong side and while he is working every inequality, every tint a little too dull is apparent to him as his picture grows, but he works on and on. And even when he finishes at last and looks down at the completed pattern he is not discouraged to see here a little crevice and there a little roughness, an open seam here, a tiny patch there where the bit of marble was too small. Now he pours his cement over it and smoothes [sic] it into every seam, and with faith puts his work to dry. Next day the pattern is turned and the perfect whole is given to view, needing only the polishing of a loving hand to make it ready to slip in place. So we should work faithfully on our pattern, cement it together with ourselves, and polish it with human kindness; and lo! the work slips into place seemingly a perfect whole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is w...ord-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[There is a] no-win decision that innumerable people make, or try to make, or try to put off making daily: Whether to give up the ...job, the place, the people, the future one holds dear, denying one's own mental capacities, independence, and desires (what are left of them, what one remembers of them) just to get away. They will find themselves disgusting if they let their tormentor get his way, not ... by touching their body ... but by forcing them to flee, to change anything they would not have changed if they were free to keep it: their white collar career or their cash register at the supermarket, it doesn't matter in the slightest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America....... The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »