Once, in Dublin, I beheld a sign painted on the closed shutters of a building marked "Civil Arts Inquiry" and this is what it said:

ART CHANGES PEOPLE
PEOPLE CHANGE THE WORLD

I agree with this. I think this is why it is important to create art. A song on a lonely road, a night at the cinema, a painting that captured the imagination; these things change people in a major way. And that changes the world: oh, how it changes us . . .

Here's the other side of the shuttered doors:

WE ARE DOING NEW WORK
AND THAT IS OUR
DOWNFALL

Now, the whole point of modernism is not really too much of anything definable excepting that it breaks from its past in a major, groundbreaking way. That's how the oddly geometrical, cubist paintings came out, how E.E. Cummings could be so hideously irreverent, and how Ezra Pound could mix a thousand myths and feel like he didn't have to explain himself. It was new and it was shocking.

Was. It was new.

Reactions to modernism can also be considered modernist even if nothing else in their philosophies agrees with another. Gerard Manley Hopkins' reaction was to retreat to an even more ancient past, to early strains of the English language. Was that modernist? There are other questions to this, too; how big of a break does it have to be? does it just have to do with style or is it thought also? a mixture of the two, perhaps?

I've always operated under the principle that there really is nothing new under the sun, and that thought colors my perspective on most subjects; these stenciled shutters make sense to me, though.  

We consistently try to find truth and show it to others in a way that will reach them where they are. We try to disarm and dismay people with our swords of truth and beauty (and whatever other principles we stand for at the moment). That happens in art--from Titian to Picasso--but the newness wears off, becomes faded and shabby. Who is shocked by Andy Warhol's bright Marilyn Monroe pictures now? What is it to us to pick up a copy of Walt Whitman's writhing, hot verses?

I wonder, sometimes, whether my work is also my downfall. No, no, no; it isn't. I'm not writing new things. I'm writing for people to know the truth--I'm writing for them to want the best for other people. I'm writing to help people understand why other people do things. And humanity is humanity the world round; my writing will be culturally dated, it will be stylistically accounted for and conceptually mundane, but I will change the world in my own small-but-maybe-artistic way. I am doing real work, and that is my salvation.