54

The intellectual content of anything - of music, painting, poetry, oratory, or acting - consists of reference to tradition, to the history of its own technique as an art, of a wealth of allusions, indeed, to many things under the sun. Expressive content is personal, individual, specific, unique. It can not be borrowed. If it is not spontaneous it is not sincere, hence not, in the long run, convincing, but intellectual content is all borrowed, it is only the choice and the appropriate usage of allusions and device that give them validity in any work. Exhibited overostentatiously, they merely prove vanity. Aptly applied they enrich the texture and delight all.

Virgil Thomson - Music reviewed 1940-54 p216

1.19.74

It is normal for art to falsify facts in the interest of form.

55

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

James Joyce Ulysses p38

...she hated as one can only hate people to whom one has been unjust.

Virgil Thomson NY Review of Books

March 7. 74 p.12

at Night

Deeply lost in the night. Just as one sometimes lowers one's head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night. All around people are asleep. It's just play acting, an innocent self-deception, that they sleep in houses, in safe beds, under a safe roof, stretched out or curled up on mattresses, in sheets, under blankets; in reality they have flocked together as they had once upon a time and again later in a deserted region, a camp in the open, a countless number of men, an army, a people, under a cold sky on earth, collapsed, where once they had stood,