rary period--nay,
of a great man of letters. And when, nine thousand nine hundred and
ninety-nine times, there results neither one nor the other, why, there
has been the talking itself--exciting and rapturous beyond everything
that literary periods and literary personalities can ever match.

'Tis with the talking of the mature and the responsible that I would
pick a quarrel. Particularly if they are well read, unprejudiced, subtle
of thought, and precise of language; and most particularly if they are
scrupulously just and full of human charity. For when two or three
persons of this sort meet together in converse, nothing escapes
destruction. The character of third persons crumbles under that delicate
and patient fingering: analysis, synthesis, rehabilitation, tender
appreciation, enthusiastic definition, leave behind only a horrid
quivering little heap of vain virtues and atrophied bad instincts. In
such conversations I have heard loyal and loving friends make
admissions and suggestions which would hang you in a court of justice; I
can bear witness to having in all loyalty and loving-kindness done so
myself a thousand times. Nor is this even the worst. For your living
human being has luckily a wonderful knack of reasserting his reality;
and the hero or victim of such conversational manipulation will take
your breath away by suddenly entering the room or entering into your
consciousness as hale and whole as old AEson stepping out of Medea's
cooking-pot. But opinions, impressions, principles, standards, possess,
alas! no such recuperative virtue; or, rather, they cannot interrupt the
discussion of themselves by putting in an appearance.

Now, silent thought, whenever it destroys, destroys only to reconstruct
the universe or the atom in the thinker's image; and new realities arise
whenever a real individual creature reveals his needs and ways of
feeling. But in what is called _a good serious talk_ there is no such
creating anew; nobody imposes his image, no whole human creature reveals
a human organism: there is merely a jumble of superposed pictures which
will not become a composite photograph; and the inherent optimism or
pessimism, scepticism or dogmatism, of each interlocutor merely
reiterates _No_ to the ways of seeing and feeling of the others. Every
word, perpetually defined and redefined at random, is used by each
speaker in a different sense and with quite different associations. The
subject under discussion is i