Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.

You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.

I suspect that the word (art) was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.

The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.

Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.

How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real.

It is useless, after all, to complain against inexorable reality.