The cacophony in my head is completely unmanageable, and it’s out of the failure to blend all those dissonant voices smoothly that whatever individuality I might have has managed to emerge. Imitation is the condition of originality. Or, to put it another way: imitation is the shortest route to and the truest test of proficiency. To mimic a master requires skill and practice, which become the sources of your own mastery.

This state of wondering paralysis cries out for criticism, which promises to sort through the glut, to assist in the formation of choices, to act as gatekeeper to our besieged sensoria.

Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. ERNEST:.

It is always the Age of Iron, and the Golden Age is always behind us, giving off a luster that illuminates the terminal shabbiness of our present condition.

Taste, we assume, is innate, reflexive, immediate, involuntary, but we also speak of it as something to be acquired. It is a private, subjective matter, a badge of individual sovereignty, but at the same time a collectively held property, bundling us into clubs, cults, communities, and sociological stereotypes.

ADMIRABLY BOLD. There’s something grand about the film’s sincerity and the intensity of its emotions and something fresh and bold about the way director Gray uses the conventions of romantic melodrama.

The origin of criticism lies in an innocent, heartfelt kind of question, one that is far from simple and that carries enormous risk: Did you feel that? Was it good for you? Tell the truth.

As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fanhood or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. Meanwhile, as citizens of the political commonwealth, we are conscripted into a polarized climate of ideological belligerence in which bluster too often substitutes for argument. There is no room for doubt and little time.

Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion. “Critical thinking” may be a ubiquitous educational slogan – a vaguely defined skill we hope our children pick up on the way to adulthood – but the rewards for not using your intelligence are immediate and abundant.

I can’t decide if this movie is so spectacularly, breathtakingly dumb as to induce stupidity in anyone who watches, or so brutally brilliant that it disarms all reason. What’s the difference?