Poetry and Pleasure
by various

Metaphysical Speculation, if a necessary evil, is the forerunner of much good. The fever of Scepticism must needs burn itself out, and burn out thereby the Impurities that caused it; then again will there be clearness, health. The principle of life, which now struggles painfully, in the outer, thin and barren domain of the Conscious or Mechanical, may then withdraw into its inner sanctuaries, its abysses of mystery and miracle; withdraw deeper than ever into that domain of the Unconscious, by nature infinite and inexhaustible; and creatively work there. From that mystic region, and from that alone, all wonders, all Poesies, and Religions, and Social Systems have proceeded: the like wonders, and greater and higher, lie slumbering there; and, brooded on by the spirit of the waters, will evolve themselves, and rise like exhalations from the Deep.
—“Characteristics”

[The mind] could be refreshed and brought to something like a rebirth, it would seem, by only one thing: an experience of order. The order would have to be actual, not projected. It would have to be present not rumored. It would have to be complete, not partial. It would have to be stable, not tentative. It would have to be given, not worked for. But if a man could feel himself moving, effortlessly and unerringly, through the corridors of a house in which each beam and tile, each lintel and sill, had instinctively assumed its palpably just place, in which doors opened without being touched to draw him deeper and deeper into ever more perfect and ever more central recesses, in which he knew, at the last and as he stood at its heart, that every stress of stone and argument of wood and grip of mortar and breath of air had arrived at a pact that would hold them together forever and him in their complacent embrace, in which the whole substantial and unruffled harmony seemed to be smiling at him as though in a mirror and intimating quietly that so much buoyant proportion was only a reflection of something that he, too, possessed, it is possible that his mind would be pleased. He would not only see order and so know it for a fact. He would for that moment, inhabit it.
—The Decline of Pleasure; Walter Kerr

There is no doubt that whatever amusement we may find in reading a purely modern novel, we have rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it. And this is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and what is not. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at all.
—“The Decay of Lying”