Asides on the Oboe

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Wallace Stevens

The prologues are over. It is a question, now,

Of final belief. So, say that final belief

Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. . .

<<This is supposed to be a page or file to show our VIEWS on the "fundamental truth" of our life. Please send me your "maxims" (any aphoristic expression) , so we can share our joys and griefs on a cyberspace.---tk>>

1.

"Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense. / Poetry is a means of redemption. / The theory of poetry is the theory of life. / Politics is the struggle for existence. / Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully. / Poetry is a renovation of experience. Originality is an escape from repetition. / Literature is the abnormal creating an illustion of the normal. / Poetry is the gaiety (joy) of language. / The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. . . "

----from "Adagia" by Wallace Stevens


2.

"Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes . . . "

---from "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson