Lost and Found -- thoughts for a sabbath

THE CLASSICAL THEMES of art have always been -- virtue, nobility, patriotism.

Since I practiced none of these in my youth, and throughout much of my career worked actively or passively to undermine them, I came -- at last -- to yearn to discover what they could possibly be in this blighted age...

Since the beginning of this century, the more I surveyed the vast and troubled social sea on which I had finally awakened adrift with the rest of the wreckage, the more I saw that these virtues -- in a shriveled and shrunken form -- seemed only to be found in the scattered sanctuaries of the Church and what remained to the Republican Party. But looking long at both these institutions I found I could not fit in either one or the other or some amalgam of both.

Gerard Van der Leun, American Digest.