Mr. Ransom’s remarks on my program for universal salvation, as outlined in the last section of the Speculation, were acute and just, and I ought to have known something everybody else knew — that we are now almost wholly committed to specialization, that without it we would have little of the goods both he and I admire, and that “our progress is irreversible.” But I am just now finding it out; after two years of attempting to combine the literary effort with an activity less exhausting than farming, I must admit that we ordinary weak humans just can’t manage it—a serious writer probably must try to keep his best hours for his work, must regard it as the thing he does best and therefore must do most, and cannot presume to practice equally difficult specialties at the same time. But—what is he going to write about?
About love—the progress of the race, when it has lost innocence, from novelty to love. Such is art, with its “compensatory concretions,” the return of the body we so rudely abstracted. “The arts are the expiations, but they are beautiful,” says Mr. Ransom. They are. But these are the conditions of both love and understanding: participation, investment, knowledge. I must not be represented as thinking it possible or even agreeable to return to the Garden; it is simply that, after a writer knows what he must write about—how is he to get hold of it?
Already have an account? Log in
Join KR for even more to read.