The Din in the Head

Today there is a well-known critic celebrated for aesthetic rhapsody, and countless minor zealots enmeshed in the vines of ri-varous ideologies, from which too many English-department Tarzans swing. But there is no grand cultural explicator and doubter, no serious traveler to the most exalted, and often the most problematical, stations of art and ideas and manners, no public mind contemplating the transcendent through the gritty resistances of human vulnerability. Trilling was conscious of a complexity of earthbound ironies: he saw that despite the loftiness of one's will or desire, the gross and the immediate impose themselves.
"The kind of critical interest I am asking the literary intellectual to take in the life around him is a proper interest of the literary mind," he stated in 1952, in one of his more roundabout sentences, five years after he had stopped writing fiction. This was not the bright and malleable sentence of a fiction writer; it was the utterance of a figure. "Art," he ended, with his most Arnoldian gesture, "strange

by contrast, are singularly chained to the mood and condition

the eclipse of an intellectual, almost never. When a society changes—and from generation to generation society always changes—art trumps time.

The eclipse of an artist can sometimes be reversed (Melville and Dickinson are the famous American examples);

beyond it. Erudition enriched his thinking, but it was intuition more than learning that pressed his sentences forward from loop to loop. He was an intellectual who wanted to be an artist.

Iroquois—the mettle of his literary scrutiny, and his excavations into the meaning of culture, surpassed the scope of the academy. He was in it and yet seemed to loom somewhere

As a young college instructor he was for a time supporting both his ailing wife and his impoverished parents; even so, he aspired to Wilson's princely freedom.

"She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation, the ubiquitous anonymous judgment to which we respond.... She herself is an agent of the Terror."

Before he was thirty, he was already seeing Arnold as the prophet of his own buried life. The public character he would acquire, his status as a figure, was eloquent, was well; but the Muse who lights the hidden self had gone away

"Story of a university teacher who never got to write"