Art Is A Kind Of

A Middling Talent Makes For A More Serene Life.

Almost Any Tale Of Our Doings Is Comic. We Are Bottomlessly Comic To Each Other. Even The Most Adored And Beloved Person Is Comic To His Lover. The Novel Is A Comic Form. Language Is A Comic Form, And Makes Jokes In Its Sleep. God, If He Existed, Would Laugh At His Creation. Yet It Is Also The Case That Life Is Horrible, Without Metaphysical Sense, Wrecked By Chance, Pain And The Close Prospect Of Death. Out Of This Is Born Irony, Our Dangerous And Necessary Tool.

There Is A Spider Called Amaurobius, Which Lives In A Burrow And Has Its Young In The Late Summer, And Then It Dies When The Frosts Begin, And The Young Spiders Live Through The Cold By Eating Their Mother's Dead Body. One Can't Believe That's An Accident. I Don't Know That I Imagined God As Having Thought It All Out, But Somehow He Was Connected With The Pattern, He Was The Pattern.

Words Are The Most Subtle Symbols Which We Possess And Our Human Fabric Depends On Them.

Every Human Soul Has Seen, Perhaps Before Their Birth, Pure Forms Such As Justice, Temperance, Beauty And All The Great Moral Qualities Which We Hold In Honour. We Are Moved Towards What Is Good By The Faint Memory Of These Forms, Simple And Calm And Blessed, Which We Saw Once In A Pure, Clear Light, Being Pure Ourselves.