"If readers were not passive,
but active and true to themselves,
literature would soon acquire a
different aspect and tend toward-
what? one wonders. An active reader
makes experiments with books; tries
out, perhaps, reshuffling their contents."

Paul Valery
*Analects*, p. 111

**

"Anyhow my poems, whether well or badly
done, always say *something.*"

Here we have the principle and origin of
horrors.

"Well or badly"- what indifference! "Something"-
what presumption!

Valery,
*Analects*, 107