From The Cave Of Making

Who would, for preference, be a bard in an oral culture, obliged at drunken feasts to improvise a eulogy of some beefy illiterate burner, giver of rings, or depend for bread on the moods of a Baroque Prince, expected, like his dwarf, to amuse? After all, it's rather a privilege amid the affluent traffic to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into background noise for study or hung as a status trophy by rising executives, cannot be "done" like Venice or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon being read or ignored: our handful of clients at least can rune. [* * *] Our forerunners might envy us our remnant still able to listen: as Nietzsche said they would, the plebs have got steadily denser, the optimates quicker still on the uptake. [* * *] We're not musicians: to stink of Poetry is unbecoming, and never to be dull shows a lack of taste. Even a limerick ought to be something a man of honor, awaiting death from cancer or a firing squad, could read without contempt: (at that frontier I wouldn't dare speak to anyone in either a prophet's bellow or a diplomat's whisper). Seeing you know our mystery from the inside and therefore how much, in our lonely dens, we need the companionship of our good dead, to give us comfort on dowly days when the self is a nonentity dumped on a mound of nothing, to break the spell of our self-enchantment when lip-smacking imps of mawk and hooey write with us what they will, you won't think me imposing if I ask you to stay at my elbow until cocktail time: dear Shade, for your elegy I should have been able to manage something more like you than this egocentric monologue, but accept it for friendship's sake.