Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did. - Randall Jarrell

When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling, we’d have known that Moby-Dick was a good book — why, how could anyone help knowing? But suppose someone says to us, “Well, you’re here now: what’s our own Moby-Dick? What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?” What do we say then?

At night there are no more farmers, no more farms. At night the fields dream, the fields are the forest. The boy stands looking at the fox As if, if he looked long enough — he looks at it. Or is it the fox is looking at the boy? The trees can't tell the two of them apart.

We read our mail and counted up our missions — In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school — Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.