The Most Beautiful Prose Paragraph Yet Written

Dark Influences From The American Past Congregate Among Us Still. If We Are A Democracy, What Are We To Make Of The Palpable Elements Of Plutocracy, Oligarchy, And Mounting Theocracy That Rule Our State? How Do We Address The Self-inflicted Catastrophes That Devastated Our Natural Environment? So Large Is Our Malaise That No Single Writer Can Encompass It. We Have No Emerson Or Whitman Among Us. An Institutionalized Counterculture Condemns Individuality As Archaic And Depreciates Intellectual Values, Even In The Universities. (the Anatomy Of Influence)

Criticism In The Universities, I'll Have To Admit, Has Entered A Phase Where I Am Totally Out Of Sympathy With 95% Of What Goes On. It's Stalinism Without Stalin.

Read Deeply, Not To Believe, Not To Accept, Not To Contradict, But To Learn To Share In That One Nature That Writes And Reads.

Reading The Very Best Writers—let Us Say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is Not Going To Make Us Better Citizens. Art Is Perfectly Useless, According To The Sublime Oscar Wilde, Who Was Right About Everything. He Also Told Us That All Bad Poetry Is Sincere. Had I The Power To Do So, I Would Command That These Words Be Engraved Above Every Gate At Every University, So That Each Student Might Ponder The Splendor Of The Insight.

In Fact, It Is Shakespeare Who Gives Us The Map Of The Mind. It Is Shakespeare Who Invents Freudian Psychology. Freud Finds Ways Of Translating It Into Supposedly Analytical Vocabulary.