has all but won. The idea that any form of writing or thought can
be, as Pound put it, news that stays news, is an absurdity.
The newspaper sells the news. But the newspaper and the many
organs of information sell something else as well. They sell the new.
When you buy a newspaper, scan one online, fl ick on a news sta-
tion on TV or radio, what you are purchasing (in one way or an-
other) is newness. You are committing yourself and your resources
to the idea that things change so rapidly and dramatically that one
must constantly “keep up.” If you slacken, if you ignore the vari ous
outlets of information for a week or a month, the ground of reality
will slip from under your feet. There will be no more there there.
Lodged within the insistent onrush of information is the impli-
cation that no form of knowledge could possibly have anything but
a transient status. What is true, or current, today will be gone by
tomorrow. Thus we guard ourselves against the pressure of fi nding
unconditioned Truth— fi nding a good and true way to live individ-
ually and collectively—by committing ourselves to sensation and
information. In this way, we both evade our hunger for Truth— for
the discoveries of the true scholar— and satisfy that hunger in a dis-
placed form. Stuff ed full of pointless information, we can consider
ourselves wise. With a sack of minute, ephemeral truths on our
backs, we can imagine that we possess the Truth. We feed ourselves
incessantly and are still starved— which only makes us more insis-
tent to consume.
What about art? What about imagination? How have we dealt
with the Soul’s hunger for the transforming artist?
Surely our culture is much in favor of art. We have all been told
repeatedly how im por tant it is to live in a world rich in creations of
the human mind. The prob lem is that the Self does not like those
creations much. Au then tic art is always in some fundamental way
Utopian. It looks out on what we have made of the world—as Blake
does, as Shelley does, as Words worth does— and it exclaims at what
252 Polemical Conclusion