This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.

It was the act of imagining herself as she had once been that enriched her syntax and extended not only her images but the coherent flow of association that led directly into the task at hand.

The better the speaker imagined herself, the more vividly she brought the dead doctor to life. It was, after all, a baptism by fire that was being described. To see her ambitious young self burning to know what her mentor knew, we had to see the mentor as well: an agent of threat and promise: a figure of equal complexity.

The job of the artist or the poet or the educator or the business person is not just to paint what we want to see, write what we want to read and hear, teach what we want to learn or produce what we want to buy. Their role is to interpret the underlying high-level objectives that we seek from art, poetry, education, or goods and services more fully than we could ourselves articulate them. Success in recasting problems to achieve our objectives more effectively than we had conceived distinguishes the great from the merely competent and demonstrates why the direct approach is so often banal.

Annie’s story deepens the dueling portraits that people paint of Sam. He is at once generous and self-serving, agreeable and threatening, a benefactor for so many people and the source of great personal pain for others. Someone who projects sincerity and altruism in public but reveals a more complicated calculus through his behaviors behind closed doors. Someone who can give and take away, leaving many with an impression that they are part of a larger game of chess for which only he can see the full board, and the end game is to preserve his power as king.

I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the virgin. The death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner as a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellant. Et cetera.

Man is a child wandering lost— to cite Baudelaire’s poem again— in the “forests of symbols.”

(The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)