Aillas groaned. “Destiny could never be so unkind.” Suldrun said in a soft voice: “Destiny doesn’t really care.” - Jack Vance

“You have not accepted my advice.”
Fair shrugged. “You asked me to remain ignorant, to accept my stupidity and ineptitude.”

Urbanized men and women experience not life but the abstraction of life, on ever higher levels of refinement and dislocation from reality. They become processors of ideas, and have evolved such esoteric occupations as the critic, the critic who criticizes criticism, and even the critic who criticizes criticism of criticism. It is a very sad misuse of human talent and energy.

And I understand they are, in a sense, artists? That is to say, they understand the creative process, the sublimation of fact to symbol and the use of symbol to suggest emotion?