The Number Of One's Possible Fantasies Is

Cripple God, Who Always Desires More Than He's Able To Have, And Doesn't Always Realize This To Begin With. Who Has Built Clocks, But Not The Time That They Measure. Has Built Systems Or Mechanisms That Serve Particular Purposes, But They Too Have Outgrown These Purposes And Betrayed Them. And Has Created An Infinity That, From Being The Measure Of The Power He Was Supposed To Have, Turned Into The Measure Of His Boundless Failure.

Genius Is Not So Much A Light As It Is A Constant Awareness Of The Surrounding Gloom.

So One Must Be Resigned To Being A Clock That Measures The Passage Of Time, Now Out Of Order, Now Repaired, And Whose Mechanism Generates Despair And Love As Soon As Its Maker Sets It Going? Are We To Grow Used To The Idea That Every Man Relives Ancient Torments, Which Are All The More Profound Because They Grow Comic With Repetition? That Human Existence Should Repeat Itself, Well And Good, But That It Should Repeat Itself Like A Hackneyed Tune, Or A Record A Drunkard Keeps Playing As He Feeds Coins Into The Jukebox.

The Twentieth Century Had Dispensed With The Formal Declaration Of War And Introduced The Fifth Column, Sabotage, Cold War, And War By Proxy, But That Was Only The Begining. Summit Meetings For Disarmament Pursued Mutual Understanding And A Balance Of Power But Were Also Held To Learn The Strengths And Weaknesses Of The Enemy. The World Of The War-or-peace Alternative Became A World In Which War Was Peace And Peace War.

A Writer Should Not Run Around With A Mirror For His Countrymen; He Should Tell His Society And His Times Things No One Ever Thought Before.