We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers.
–Paul Valery

As this first year in the last decade of the twentieth century draws to a close, there can be no question but that our culture is in deep and terrible trouble. The engines of publicity–in the arts no less than in politics, if one may still make such a distinction–continue to produce their preposterous claims, and there is no shortage of people eager, if not indeed desperate, to embrace them even in the absence of any real conviction about their truth. But these empty rituals of celebration can no longer disguise the profound and enduring malaise that now pervades virtually every sphere of cultural life. The feeling that the arts have been captured by the enemies of art is more widespread than ever before. So is the sense that the standards that once guided us in matters of artistic accomplishment, intellectual analysis, and moral inquiry have now been supplanted by attitudes and ideologies that, in regard to both art and life, are transparently corrupt and corrupting. In the atmosphere of cynicism and opportunism that encloses so many aspects of our culture today, the very idea of stringent judgment and rigorous distinction, without which the life of art and the life of the mind are nothing but a