"Lunula

O luna novella,
Es digna fabella
Quae versibus edat

Itinera Sputnik
Tam ardua ut nic--
Tans Lucifer cedat."

--Van L. Johnson, The Classical Outlook (Dec 1957)

"Legend has it that Julius Caesar invented the art of
reading silently." --Thomas Winter

" 'I have never been prouder of my profession,' he
remarks, 'than when my friend Dorothy Day (the
Catholic pacifist) told me of something that happened
when she did some time in the Women's House of
Detention. Each prisoner was taken out to be bathed
once a week. Dorothy shared a cell with a whore and,
when the time came, Dorothy's cellmate was led off
toward the shower chanting a line from Auden:
"Thousands have lived without love, not one without
water".' " --In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety,
Alan Levy (1983) [interviews w/ A.]

I think it'd be wise to assume from now on that none of
my ideas is truly new or unique but that my perceptions
may very well be--though i tend to believe the converse.
An insight is first a perception: and by conceptualizing
it it passes through a prism of language in which some
qualities are bound to be lost, and conventional ones
added. A due respect for ideas will acknowledge the
tragedy of their birth. A due respect for the moment
will seek not spontaneity but openness to grace.

"It's perfectly all right to be an engagé writer
as long as you don't think you're changing things.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead...
but the social and political history of Europe would be
exactly the same if Dante and Shakespeare and Mozart
had never lived." --Auden loc cit [What about Langland?]

Barbarians oversimplify into banality, decadents overelaborate
into obfuscation. High culture means clarity in complexity.

"Even one alone verse sometimes makes a perfect poeme."
--Ben Jonson, Discoveries