I thank whatever Gods that be that even at the age of 89 my mind remains restless and eager to absorb new facts, new theories, new ways of looking at life and the world, new stories of mankind’s continual search for perfected knowledge, new illuminations of the spirit. Not a day passes which is not full of surprises for the mind, insights which set me thinking in ways not thought before.
I was reading about the poet W.H. Auden, whose poetry I often love to read – but I had not seen this description of how he conceived of the making of poetry:
“A poet has one duty which is to try, and by one’s example, to protect the purity of the language. I’m a passionate formalist on hedonistic grounds……In order to write at any given moment I have two things on my mind. One is a certain subject I’m interested in and the other is a series of formal questions connected with language. It may be metre, it may be diction, what-have-you, and the subject looks the right form and the form looks the right subject. When these things come together, then you’re able to write. What one secretly hopes from readers is that they will say ‘My God, I knew that all the time but I never realized it before.’ That’s the ideal reaction and then you know that you have said something that is true. I think if you ask me what is the function of not only literature but of all the arts I would say what Dr. Johnson said, ‘The aim of writing is to enable readers a little better to enjoy life or a little better to endure it.’”