The Sunday Times of London reprinted a wickedly irreverent and very funny piece by Auden, entitled (by an editor at the Times, no doubt) "So You Think You Can Write." I can't resist giving you three longer excerpts.
First this:
The girl whose boyfriend starts writing her love poems should be on her guard. Perhaps he really does love her, but one thing is certain: while he was writing his poems he was not thinking of her but of his own feelings about her and that is suspicious. Let her remember St Augustine’s confession of his feelings after the death of someone he loved very much: “I would rather have been deprived of my friend than of my grief.”
Then this:
Everyone in his heart of hearts agrees with Baudelaire: “To be a useful person has always seemed to me something particularly horrible,” for, subjectively, to be useful means to be doing not what one wants to do, but what someone else insists on one’s doing. But at the same time, everyone is ashamed to admit in public that he is useless. Thus if a poet gets into conversation with a stranger in a railway coach and the latter asks him: “What is your job?”, he will think quickly and say: “A schoolteacher, a beekeeper, a bootlegger,” because to tell the truth would cause an incredulous and embarrassing silence.
Finally, this:
Happy the lot of the pure mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers and the standard is so high that no colleague can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes articles in the Sunday [New York] Times complaining about the incomprehensibility of modern mathematics and comparing it unfavourably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms or fill bathtubs with the waste-pipe open.
As I was reading that last passage, I couldn't help thinking that philosophers have a similar reason to envy the pure mathematician. (Come to think of it, both the philosopher and the pure mathematician can sympathize with the thoughts expressed in the second passage, the feeling of embarrassment at admitting to being useless.)
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