It Seems To Me That Canadian Sensibility

No Matter How Much Experience We May Gather In Life, We Can Never In Life Get The Dimension Of Experience That The Imagination Gives Us. Only The Arts And Sciences Can Do That, And Of These, Only Literature Gives Us The Whole Sweep And Range Of Human Imagination As It Sees Itself

The Twentieth Century Saw An Amazing Development Of Scholarship And Criticism In The Humanities, Carried Out By People Who Were More Intelligent, Better Trained, Had More Languages, Had A Better Sense Of Proportion, And Were Infinitely More Accurate Scholars And Competent Professional Men Than I. I Had Genius. No One Else In The Field Known To Me Had Quite That.

The World Of Literature Is A World Where There Is No Reality Except That Of The Human Imagination.

It Seems To Me That Canadian Sensibility Has Been Profoundly Disturbed, Not So Much By Our Famous Problem Of Identity, Important As That Is, As By A Series Of Paradoxes In What Confronts That Identity. It Is Less Perplexed By The Question "who Am I?" Than By Some Such Riddle As "where Is Here?

To Bring Anything Really To Life In Literature We Can't Be Lifelike: We Have To Be Literature-like