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21 " By most people the 'sense of reality' is understood to be the submission to events and indeed illusion is often salvation. "
― Lionel Trilling
22 " Academic time moves quickly. A college year is not really a year, lacking as it does three months. And it is endlessly divided into units which, at their beginning, appear larger than they are — terms, half terms, months, weeks. And the ultimate unit, the hour, is not really an hour, lacking as it does ten minutes. "
― Lionel Trilling ,
23 " ...perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful... "
24 " At least at the beginning of our intellectual careers we are like nothing so much as those young members of Indian tribes who have had a vision or a dream which confers power in exchange for the withdrawal from ordinary life of the tribe. Or we are like the adventuring youngest son who is kind to some creature on his travels and receives in reward a magical object. By intellectuality we are freed from the commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and the hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractibility of family things. It gives us power over intangibles, such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our youth we suppose is inevitably directed at those who take seriously the small concerns of this world, which we know to be inadequate and doomed by the very fact that it is so absurdly conditioned -- by things, habits, local and temporary customs, and the foolish errors and solemn absurdities of the men of the past. "
25 " exigent "
― Lionel Trilling , The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays of Lionel Trilling
26 " At the present moment, art cannot be said to make exigent demands upon the audience. That segment of our culture which is at all responsive to contemporary art is wholly permeable by it. The situation no longer obtains in which the experience of a contemporary work begins in resistance and proceeds by relatively slow stages to a comprehending or submissive admiration. The artist now can make scarcely anything which will prove really exigent to the audience, which will outrage its habitual sensibility. The audience likes or does not like, is pleased or not pleased—the faculty of ‘taste’ has re-established itself at the centre of the experience of art. "
― Lionel Trilling , Sincerity and Authenticity
27 " It is the exceptional novelist today who would say of himself, as Henry James did, that he ‘loved the story as story’, by which James meant the story apart from any overt ideational intention it might have, simply as, like any primitive tale, it brings into play what he called ‘the blessed faculty of wonder’. Already in James’s day, narration as a means by which the reader was held spellbound, as the old phrase put it, had come under suspicion. And the dubiety grew to the point where Walter Benjamin could say some three decades ago that the art of story-telling was moribund. T. S. Eliot’s famous earlier statement, that the novel had reached its end with Flaubert and James, would seem to be not literally true; the novel does seem to persist in some sort of life. But we cannot fail to see how uneasy it is with the narrative mode, which once made its vital principle, and how its practitioners seek by one device or another to evade or obscure or palliate the act of telling. "
