"Traders in ideas" - ainda a Criação

«As a professional critic of life and letters, my principal business in the world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorow, which is to say, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane and outrageous by all right thinking men, and so opposite and sound that they will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and force themselves into the tradicional wisdom of the race. I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday, with new labels stuck rakishly upon them. This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the concievable human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day's work. The most they can ever accomplish in the way of genuine originality is an occasional brilliant spurt, an half a dozen such spurts, particularly if they come close together and show a certain co-ordination, are enough to make a practitioner celebrated, and even imortal. Nature, indeed, conspires against all such genuine originality, and I have no doubt that God is agaisnt it on His heavenly throne, and His vicars and partisans unquestionably are on this earth.»


Henry Louis Mencken - in In Defense of Women, Introduction