[258x400]The cultural aura, or whatever it is, that insulates us from nature consists of words, and the verbal part of it is what i call a mythology, or the total structure of human creation conveyed by words, with literature at its centre. Such a mythology belongs to the mirror, not to the window. It is designed to draw a circumference around human society and reflect its concerns, not to look directly at the nature outside.

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A glance out of the window of an aeroplane, to the patterns of the landscape or city lights below, will tell us why this is the century of Kandinsky and not that of Constable or Ruysdael; more important, it will also tell us that the space for us has become a set of coordinated points: we do not live in a centered space any more, but have to create our own centres.

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It has been said that those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it: this means very little, because we are all in the position of voters in a Canadian election, condemned to repeat history anyway whether we learn it or not. But those who refuse to confront their own real past, in whatever form, are condemning themselves to die without having been born.

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I sometimes wonder whether the work of creation in a society is really effective if it meets no social resistance at all. <...> One applauds the tolerance, except the public is so seldom tolerant about anything unless it has become indifferent to it as well. A world where arts are totally tolerated might easily become a world in which they were merely decorative, and evoked no sense of challenge to repression at all.

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There is a much deeper level on which the arts form part of our heritage of freedom, and where inner repression by the individual and external repression in society makes them constantly felt. That is why totalitarian societies, for example, find themselves unable either to tolerate the arts or to generate new forms of them.

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In the complete form of the myth an absolute beginning implies an absolute end. But such an end would have to be the end of death, not of life, a death of death in which life has become assimilated to the unending. Thus the biblical creation myth takes us back to one of the most 'primitive' of all views: that death, the most natural of all events, the one thing we know will always happen, is nevertheless somehow wrong and unnatural, not part of the original scheme of things.

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Every reader recreates what he reads: even if he is reading a letter from a personal friend he is still recreating it into his own personal orbit. Recreation of this sort always involves some kind of translation.