“Today the city is preoccupied with food. In the 70's, we were preoccupied with sex. It was a moment of total hedonism with no consequences, no AIDS. And there was birth control and little thought of getting married. Now, a 25-year-old knows 70 kinds of sushi, but at what expense? A youth spent on restaurants is a youth misspent.”
(Fran Leibowitz, a throwaway quote on the glory days of NYC in The New York Times.)
“. . . But when I hear other kinds of discussion, especially the talk of rich businessmen like you, I get bored and feel sorry for you and your friends, because you think you're doing something important, when you're not. Perhaps you regard me as a failure, and I think you're right. But I don't think you're a failure, I know you are.”
(Apollodorus, in Plato's Symposium, trans. Christopher John Gill)
Not magnitude, not lavishness,
But Form—the Site;
Not innovating wilfulness,
But reverence for the Archetype.
(Herman Melville)
The child is feather to the man;
mice don’t brood. The swiftest race
to the pie. In the sky an encomium
rewards all who notice it.
This isn’t the way I meant to live
but I must or will have to move.
In broader streets the video preference
startles a dozing anomaly—“Come again?”
I just did. I want it to be all clean
and tasting of only distance and water.
There is a stairway in my pocket
and pheasants on the railway
and all I ever had was to be yours,
your instructor. Again I fell for it,
his pencil sharpener. Over time that
made him quite difficult and complicated.
Now is only sun, sunstrife and sea.
(John Ashbery)