"Back forty years ago I wrote of The Gist of Origin: 'In such a bare age as ours, the truth, though terrible, is clean. The worlds of Chaucer, Homer and Tolstoy were conventionally realized ones--even if the men in them shifted between realizations, incorrigibly. We now are in the same ferry as these chaotic Americans: we have no fixities to shift among. The only order they bring with them--and it is not nothing--is an economy of means.
Ultimately the variety--of place, of instance, of event, of impression is deceptive. Also the enormous amount to be learnt from them,...