Ezra Pound |
I began my intellectual life in mathematics. The wonderful thing about math is you know where you stand. You solve a problem or not. As a sophomore at Cal Tech, I saw the handwriting on the wall, which is to say, I saw my limitations. I met fellow student-mathematicians who smoked me. Fine, I had published as a sophomore! What a fine engineer I could become! But I wanted to be a creative mathematician, a pure mathematician, and I just didn't have the chops. I was like the miler who couldn't break four minutes and knows in his gut he will never break four minutes. I'm sorry, Modern Mom, but little Johnny is not going to be a baseball star. That's the breaks.
There's a great confusion in the land, the confusion of "democratic rights" with "talent" and "skill." The reach of democracy does not include all possible human activity. If you want brain surgery to be democratic, you are a masochist. If you want mathematics to be democratic, you don't understand what mathematics is. And I say, if you want the arts to be democratic, you are flirting with giving far too much attention to mediocrity.
In my 19th C Popular Lit class at UCLA, we studied the best selling novelists of the 19th century. I never heard of any of them. Q.E.D.
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