What Preoccupies Us, Then, Is Not God

Our American Past Always Speaks To Us With Two Voices: The Voice Of The Past, And The Voice Of The Present. We Are Always Asking Two Quite Different Questions. Historians Reading The Words Of John Winthrop Usually Ask, What Did They Mean To Him? Citizens Ask, What Do They Mean To Us? Historians Are Trained To Seek The Original Meaning; All Of Us Want To Know The Present Meaning.

I Write To Discover What I Think.

While Knowledge Is Orderly And Cumulative, Information Is Random And Miscellaneous.

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.

It Is Only A Short Step From Exaggerating What We Can Find In The World To Exaggerating Our Power To Remake The World. Expecting More Novelty Than There Is, More Greatness Than There Is, And More Strangeness Than There Is, We Imagine Ourselves Masters Of A Plastic Universe. But A World We Can Shape To Our Will Is A Shapeless World.