Lucky Is The Man Who Does Not

If Poets Often Commit Suicide, It Is Not Because Their Poems Are Bad But Because They Are Good. Whoever Heard Of A Bad Poet Committing Suicide? The Reader Is Only A Little Better Off. The Exhilaration Of A Good Poem Lasts Twenty Minutes, An Hour At Most. Unlike The Scientist, The Artist Has Reentry Problems That Are Frequent And Catastrophic.

The Enduring Is Something Which Must Be Accounted For. One Cannot Simply Shrug It Off.

What Is The Nature Of The Search? You Ask. Really It Is Very Simple, At Least For A Fellow Like Me; So Simple That It Is Easily Overlooked. The Search Is What Anyone Would Undertake If He Were Not Sunk In The Everydayness Of His Own Life. This Morning, For Example, I Felt As If I Had Come To Myself On A Strange Island.

The Mystery Lies In The Here And Now. The Mystery Is: What Is One To Do With Oneself? As You Get Older You Begin To Realize The Trick Time Is Playing, And That Unless You Do Something About It, The Passage Of Time Is Nothing But The Encroachment Of The Horrible Banality Of The Past On The Pure Future. The Past Devours The Future Like A Tape Recorder, Converting Pure Possibility Into Banality. The Present Is The Tape Head, The Mouth Of Time. Then Where Is The Mystery And Why Bother Kicking Through The Ashes? Because There Is A Clue In The Past.

To Become Aware Of The Possibility Of The Search Is To Be Onto Something.