He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there–those laws to which every profound work of the intellect bring us nearer and which are invisible only–if then!– to fools.

— Marcel Proust from The Captive

The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?

My God, no hymne for thee?

My soul’s a shepherd too; a flock it feeds

Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.

The pasture is thy word: the streams thy grace

Enriching all the place.

Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers

Out-sing the day-light houres.

Then we will chide the sunne for letting night

Take up his place and right:

We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should

Himself the candle hold.

I will go searching, till I find a sunne

Shall stay, till we have done;

A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,

As frost-nipt sunnes look sadly.

Then we will sing, and shine all our own day,

And one another pay:

His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,

Till ev’n his beams sing, and my musick shine.

— George Herbert

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. From Christ to Freud we have believed that, if we know the truth, the truth will set us free; art is indispensable because so much of this truth can be learned through works of art and through works of art alone–for which of us could have learned for himself what Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke, Shakespeare and Homer learned for us? And in what other way could they have made us see the truths which they themselves saw, those differing and contradictory truths which seem nevertheless, to the mind which contains them, in some sense a single truth? And all these things, by their very nature, demand to be shared; if we are satisfied to know these things ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference at those who do not have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as surely as anything can. If while most of our people (the descendants of those who, ordinarily, listened to Grimm’s Tales and the ballads and the Bible; who, exceptionally, listened to Aeschylus and Shakespeare) listen not to simple or naive art, but to an elaborate and sophisticated substitute for art, an immediate and infallible synthetic as effective and terrifying as advertisements or the speeches of Hitler– if, knowing all this, we say: Art has always been a matter of a few, we are using a truism to hide a disaster. One of the oldest , deepest, and most nearly conclusive attractions of democracy is manifested in our feeling that through it not only material but also spiritual goods can be shared: that in a democracy bread and justice, education and art, will be accessible to everybody. If a democracy should offer its citizens a show of education, a sham art, a literacy more dangerous that their old illiteracy, then we should have to say that it is not a democracy at all, but one more variant of those ‘People’s Democracies’ which share with any truce democracy little more than the name. Goethe said: The only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of another person is love. But we can also come to terms with superiority, with true Excellence, by denying that such a thing as Excellence can exist; and, in doing so, we help to destroy it and ourselves.

— Randall Jarrell, from The Obscurity of the Poet