"The first credential
we should demand of a critic
is his ideograph of the good."
– Ezra Pound,
How to Read
A spoiler from the 1974 novel in last night's post
"Last Year's Valentine"—
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Near the conclusion of Charles Johnson's novel "She was more than any one path, or the total of them all. She would glean from each its store of the Good Thing, would conjure it up: the enthusiasm and naïveté of youth, the self-sacrifice of the streetwalker, and the love that even the most miserable housewife received— exhausting them, moving on to another path, and another. That was life, children. And when she’d traveled the existing paths, she would create a new, untrodden one. That was progress. If she discovered X number of paths and traveled them all, then she, before she died, would leave X-plus-1. That was responsibility: factoring the possible number of paths to the Good Thing, but not becoming fixed, or held to those paths in her history, or the history of the race. Moving always on . . ." |
I prefer Sinatra's version.