If Society Abolishes Poetry It Commits Spiritual

Love Is Born At First Sight; The Friendship Of A Frequent And Lengthy Exchange.

To Read A Poem Is To Hear It With Our Eyes; To Hear It Is To See It With Our Ears.

The Religion Of Art, Like The Religion Of Politics, Was Born From The Ruins Of Christianity. Art Inherited From The Old Religion The Power Of Consecrating Things And Endowing Them With A Sort Of Eternity; Museums Are Our Temples, And The Objects Displayed In Them Are Beyond History. Politics--or More Precisely, Revolution--co-opted The Other Function Of Religion: Changing Human Beings And Society. Art Was An Asceticism, A Spiritual Heroism; Revolution Was The Construction Of A Universal Church.

There Is Nothing Sacred Or Untouchable Except The Freedom To Think. Without Criticism, That Is To Say, Without Rigor And Experimentation, There Is No Science, Without Criticism There Is No Art Or Literature. I Would Also Say That Without Criticism There Is No Healthy Society.

It May Seem Paradoxical To Say That We Have Been Expelled From The Present, But It Is A Feeling We Have All Had At Some Moment. Some Of Us Experienced It First As A Condemnation, Later Transformed Into Consciousness And Action. The Search For The Present Is Neither The Pursuit Of An Earthly Paradise Nor That Of A Timeless Eternity: It Is The Search For A Real Reality.