No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment. - Aldous Huxley

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students — how to write piercingly. But what on earth's the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing — you know, like the very hardest X-rays — when you're writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?

To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.

First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.