Slowly we are learning, We at least know this much, That we have to unlearn Much that we were taught, And are growing chary Of emphatic dogmas; Love … - W. H. Auden

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water,
And the expensive ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.