"Maybe my book will be in the libraries. Maybe a child, who in all secrecy is fond of poetry, will someday find it there, read the poems, and feel something from them, something that the people around her don't understand. And that odd child doesn't know me at all. She won't think that I'm a living young girl who works, eats, and sleeps like other people."
Poetry is not an opinion expressed. It is a song that rises from a bleeding wound or a smiling mouth.
"i worked hard on those books," he explained, steadying himself on the arm of the couch. "they're poetry. and they're a better suicide note than anything i'd be able to come up with right now."
Living as he does much of the time in a world of metaphor, the poet is always acutely conscious that metaphor has no value apart from its function; that it is a device, an artifice. So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and Gad as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.
Poets have been at this for centuries. It is the only useful purpose they do serve in society: and if every poet were to vanish tomorrow, society would live no longer than the quick memories and dead books of their poetry.
It is the "role" of the poet, this 20th Century. To lie.
Firstly, contrary to what many people think, science is not a collection of facts about the world. That is called ‘knowledge’. Rather, science is a way of thinking and making sense of the world, which can then lead to new knowledge. There are, of course, many routes to gaining knowledge and insight, whether through art, poetry and literature, religious texts, philosophical debate, or through contemplation and reflection. That said, however, if you want to know about how the world really is—what physicists like me sometimes refer to as the ‘true nature of reality’—then science has a big advantage, for it relies on the ‘scientific method’.
