4pQonT

EZRA POUND 211
then, that a nation's literature is important. Words, means of
communication, literature, the most condensed form of communication,
communication of the most basic and essential facts;
ideas necessary for leading the good life registered in the best
books. And man's duty as soon as he is fully a man is to keep
those books and that tradition available. Keep it handy.
"And the public, American and English, but for the moment
let me speak of the United States, the American public, rather
like that lunatic in Paio's novel 'Mosquardino.' A chap in the
gook house who just wouldn't believe that there could be enough
microbes on the back of a postage stamp to knock a man cold. He
thought it was doctor's fables, in fact he thought that the doctors
had it from the other gooks in the asylum.
"Well, the Americans and the English just couldn't believe that
it made any difference what a man or a nation put inside its head.
. . . Hence I was supposed to exaggerate when I bust out against
such dung heaps of perfumed pus as the Atlantic Monthly, and
Harper's and Scribner's as they were in the year 1900, and
ceased not essentially to be . . . Their stink of stale perfume
contained deadly gases which finally poisoned. No language could
quite cover the loathing I feel for a Sedgwick but it doubtless
seems exaggerated. Later on, in London I did try to make a few
people see why the printed matter on sale in that city would finally
kill off the inhabitants. Witness Dunkirk.
"The 19th stinking century saw what is called an advance in
science. People learned that bacilli can kill, and the concept of
prophylaxis entered the general mind. But an older concept got
knocked out of the popular mind. It has been possibly a good
concept, but it decayed, it is what is or was called a biological
concept. The age called the age of faith thought a wrong idea
could bring evil. In the Middle Ages, they got a bit fantastic,
dropped their eyes off the here and now and thought the bad idea
would land a man in perdition, eternal flames, purgatory or whatever.
Then something got tangled and people got fanatic and
heretics were burnt and so forth. And Monsieur Voltaire tried
to get that untangled; worked all his life against the cruelties of
fanaticism, got himself called the atheist, which he was not.
"Now, I strongly suspect that almost no heretics were burnt, at