October 30, 2004
Still later in the day...

I read this in today's Writer's Almanac, and it seemed to potentially address the questions raised with the last one I excerpted:

"[Ezra] Pound was set on supporting innovations in all kinds of literature."

[So he was a forward-thinker, supporting forward-thinkers.]

"He critically and financially supported writers like James Joyce, Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot. He said he had 'to keep alive a certain group of advancing poets, to set the arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization.'"

I thought you might appreciate the flip side, the idea that artists are the guide and lamp, out in front, illuminating the path, advancing literature or the fine arts or visual and musical arts or whatever arts you can think of. Call these people what you like: forward thinkers, innovators, explorers, risk-takers; maybe they're techno-wizards like Stephen Spielberg or maybe they're anti-technology like Barbara Kingsolver and Wendell Berry...whichever direction they go, they are most likely not flopping-along.

Perhaps that's my fear, of being status-quo; of just going with the flow, not really thinking about life, not really making choices...just letting things roll over me by default. Maybe that's it.