80
PARTISAN REVIEW
"The air-ship barely takes two days to fly between me and you."
"I dislike air-ships."
"Why?"
"I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the
stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air-ship."
"I do not get them anywhere else."
"What kind of ideas can the air give you?"
He paused for an instant.
"Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong, and three
stars close together in the middle of the oblong, and hanging from these
stars, three other stars?"
"No, I do not. I dislike the stars. But did they give you an idea?
How interesting; tell me."
"I had an idea that they were like a man."
"I do not understand."
"The four big stars are the man's shoulders and his knees. The three
stars in the middle are like the belts that men wore once, and the three
stars hanging are like a sword."
"A sword?"
"Men carried swords about with them, to kill animals and other
men."
"It does not strike me as a very good idea, but it is certainly
original."
As long as these stars remain in this shape; as long as there is a man
left to look at them and to discover that they are the being Orion: for at
least this long the poet will have his public. And when this man too is
gone, and neither the poems, the poet, nor the public exist any longer–
and this possibility can no longer seem to us as strange as it would once
have seemed-there is surely some order of the world, some level of be–
ing, at which they still subsist: an order in which the lost plays of
Aeschylus are no different from those that have been preserved, an
order in which the past, the present, and the future have in some sense
the same reality. Or so-whether we think so or not-so we all feel.
People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to
answer,
For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter be–
cause in the end Someone will pay you for being?
. . . The poet writes
his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which
the poem takes the place that has awaited it.
But this has been said, better than it is ever again likely to
be
said, by the greatest of the writers of this century, Marcel Proust; and I
should like to finish this lecture by quoting his sentences:
All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as
though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a
former life; there
is
no reason inherent in the conditions of life on
this
