The Traveler Was Active; He Went Strenuously

The Hero Created Himself; The Celebrity Is Created By The Media.

It Is Only A Short Step From Exaggerating What We Can Find In The World To Exaggerating Our Power To Remake The World.

Our Attitude Toward Our Own Culture Has Recently Been Characterized By Two Qualities, Braggadocio And Petulance. Braggadocio - Empty Boasting Of American Power, American Virtue, American Know-how - Has Dominated Our Foreign Relations Now For Some Decades. Here At Home - Within The Family, So To Speak - Our Attitude To Our Culture Expresses A Superficially Different Spirit, The Spirit Of Petulance. Never Before, Perhaps, Has A Culture Been So Fragmented Into Groups, Each Full Of Its Own Virtue, Each Annoyed And Irritated At The Others.

Creators, Makers Of The New, Can Never Become Obsolete, For In The Arts There Is No Correct Answer. The Story Of Discoverers Could Be Told In Simple Chronological Order, Since The Latest Science Replaces What Went Before. But The Arts Are Another Story- A Story Of Infinite Addition. We Must Find Order In The Random Flexings Of The Imagination.

Of All The Nations In The World, The United States Was Built In Nobody's Image. It Was The Land Of The Unexpected, Of Unbounded Hope, Of Ideals, Of Quest For An Unknown Perfection. It Is All The More Unfitting That We Should Offer Ourselves In Images. And All The More Fitting That The Images Which We Make Wittingly Or Unwittingly To Sell America To The World Should Come Back To Haunt And Curse Us.