Furious affections

Thinking back to more tumultuous times of my life I am struck how little we change in some respects: love is an almost constant, no matter the age group. I'm now in much contact with very young persons, and though there is an immaturity there, in most, there is also a maturity that comes from the very fierceness of the feelings. Once again, or maybe actually only too rarely, I am reminded of my own luck: I never would have thought that I would turn out to be lucky in such central matters, in being able of fierceness... Anyway, youth is a kind of an automatic immunization against non-fierceness, non-furiousness - it's no good to advice, and I don't, but the young surely would do well to remember that it is only too possible to lose that immunity with age ("the only enemy"). But if they do find love, and surely many will, they will keep their connection to the essential and not lose it in the routine triviality of daily life.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Yeats is... - Yeats is one of the wonders of the Western world. I believe literature is the most humanity has ever achieved: really, all we pretty much have to show for ourselves are our books, and now that we are slowly but surely distancing ourselves from literature, are we not regressing? This thought came to my mind once again as I was delighting myself in R.F. Forsters great, great biography of Yeats.

It is very hard to characterize Yeats - of course, one can say, and I have, that he was completely dotty, disconnected, and he was, but that's actually almost totally misleading: he was very, very shrewd even in his dottiness (and compare that with Pound's quite pathological version). He was no politician, no idealogue, and that he knew - in some ways he really knew himself. And the poetry: light of evening, Lissadell... It's quite something, quite something else, and equally hard to characterize. I often find myself ambivalent: it's no ancient dusty tomb, it engages, enrages, delights, one of the wonders of the Western world.

And that is really what we have to show for ourselves, as much civilization as we have ever had: art, literature. Increasingly unimportant things.