Pain ... After You've Lived With It

You Meet A New Person, You Go With Him And Suddenly You Get A Whole New City...you Go Down New Streets, You See Houses You Never Saw Before, Pass Places You Didn't Even Know Were There. Everything Changes.

Ah, Well, During The Middle Ages, Religion Was Often Able To Redeem Art. Today, However, Art Is About The Only Thing That Can Redeem Religion, And The Clerics Will Never Forgive Us For That.

You Know What I Do? I Listen To Other People, Stumbling About With Their Half Thoughts And Half Sentences And Their Clumsy Feelings That They Can't Express, And It Hurts Me. So I Go Home And Burnish It And Polish It And Weld It To A Rhythmic Frame, Make The Dull Colors Gleam, Mute The Garish Artificiality To Pastels, So It Doesn't Hurt Any More: That's My Poem. I Know What They Want To Say, And I Say It For Them.

It Is A Magic Book. Words Mean Things. When You Put Them Together They Speak. Yes, Sometimes They Flatten Out And Nothing They Say Is Real, And That Is One Kind Of Magic. But Sometimes A Vision Will Rip Up From Them And Shriek And Clank Wings Clear As The Sweat Smudge On The Paper Under Your Thumb. And That Is Another Kind.

Historically, I Guess That's How Science Fiction Works: You Start By Using Aliens To Think The Unthinkable — And Then, Eventually, Another Writer, Having Grown A Little More Comfortable With The Earlier Notion, Brings It Into The Human.