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The Era

The time holds down your head; the era grabs your pen;
The powers that be manipulate your fingers;
It isn’t who creates, but when;

And art, the beauty of the world distilled —
Fate’s pharmacy, prescriptions of patterns and tinctures —
Is swirling in a flask the works of malingerers,
For everything’s the Age, and nothing is willed.

Somehow the Great Ineffable owns a hand;
The formless void yet forms a left and right;
Existence in the west is to enjoy and fight,
And in the east to suffer and understand.

Existence in the west is to enjoy and fight,
And in the east to suffer and understand.

Probably an echo of a statement by Virginia Woolf in her essay “Modern Fiction.” Woolf compares Russian and English fiction, and while acknowledging the superiority of Russian novels, adds:
But perhaps we see something that escapes them or why should this voice of protest mix itself with our gloom? The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilization which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.