P. 12
Notice here the corollary. If some
fatal progress of applied science ever enables us in fact to reach
the Moon, that real journey will not at all satisfy the impulse which
we now seek to gratify by writing such stories. The real Moon, if you
could reach it and survive, would in a deep and deadly sense be just
like anywhere else. You would find cold, hunger, hardship and danger;
and after the first few hours they would be simply cold,
hunger hardship and danger as you might have met on earth. And death
would be simply death among those bleached
craters as it is simply death in a nursing home at Sheffield. No man
would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort
of man who could find it in his own back garden. “He who would
bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the
Indies with him.
P. 16
Something which the educated receive
from poetry can reach the masses through stories of adventure.
P.16
An literary reader can be defined as
one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never
read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or
Shakespeare's Sonnet: but
what can you do with a man who says he “has read” them, meaning
that he has read them once, and he thinks this settles the
matter....If you find that the reader of popular romances—however
uneducated the read, however bad the romances—goes back to his old
favorites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that
they are to him a sort of poetry.
P. 17
We do not enjoy a story fully at the
first reading. Not till the curiousity, the sheer narrative lust, has
been given its sop and laid alseep, are we at leisure to savour the
real beauties. Till then it is like wasting great wine on ravenous
natural thurst which merely want cold wetness.
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