The Veritable Small

Ah, inquisitor of structures! This week I rediscovered that unmistakable reason. Why have we forgotten the man who once explained to The New Republic that genteel traditions divide--they make the genius feel ashamed--because they offer only two actions: "You either identified yourself with the national mind and expressed it sympathetically, or you broke away from it altogether, denounced it as narrow, stupid, and oppressive, and removed yourself offendedly to Greece or to Italy, to sing of lovely sensuality or celestial justice."

George Santayana makes life gentle; we should read him, and revere him, and remember why Wallace Stevens elegized,

"It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

How easily the blown banners change to wings...
Things dark on the horizons of perception
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

The human end in the spirit's greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown."

I too want what he wanted, what he learned from his peripatetic mentor, what we all require in the total grandeur of a total edifice,

"To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that which
Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible."