aklinstopia

Good taste is that taste which is a good possession, a friend to the whole man. It will not suffer him to dote on things however seductive, which rob him of some nobler companionships. To have a foretaste of such a loss, and to reject instinctively whatever will cause it, is the very essence of refinement. Good taste comes, therefore, from experience, in the best sense of that word; it comes from having united in one’s memory and character the fruit of many diverse undertakings.

Mere taste is apt to be bad taste, since it regards nothing but a chance feeling. Chance feeling needs to fortify itself with reasons and to find its level in the great world. When it has added fitness to its sincerity, beneficence to its passion, it will have acquired a right to live. Violence and self-justification will not pass muster in a moral society, for vipers possess both, and must nevertheless be stamped out. Citizenship is conferred only on creatures with human and co-operative instincts. A civilized imagination has to understand and to serve the world.

The truth is that mere sensation or mere emotion is an indignity to a mature human being. A refined mind finds as little happiness in love without friendship as sensuality without love; it may succumb to both, but it accepts neither.

It is better to have access to more than one profound truth.  To be able to hold comfortably in one’s mind the validity and usefulness of two contradictory truths is the source of tolerance, openness, and, most important a sense of humor, which is the greatest enemy of fanaticism.  Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly better to have one profound truth, one god, one narrative, than to have none.

The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes.  Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.

Literature is to the race what autobiography is to the individual; it is the “Life and Remains of the natural man.”  Literature is more than style, form, and sensibility.  It is the image of man as he moves.  Everywhere we get propositions about him or measurement of him, but here he is half dust, half idea.  The poet who paints the passions well, has not shown us his riches, but ours.  Great literature is about its reader, the man who is always different and who never changes.  The capacity to believe history is the capacity to see many potentialities in men, and to understand that extreme behavior are confined by no providence to the past.  The subject of literature is human possibility, which is not infinite but which is greater than complacency admits.

He likes people to have ‘character’, cost what it may in frustration.  He holds fast to the belief that the right quality of human life, its intensity, its creativity, its felt actuality, its weightiness, requires the stimulus of exigence.