So much needless fear and sorrow

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is offered only once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way
with exactly the same kisses.

One day, perhaps, some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

- Wisława Szymborska, "Nothing Twice"

It is difficult to guard against madness

"I cannot be sure that this child will not turn my head if I go on hearing him often; he makes me realize that it is difficult to guard against madness on seeing prodigies. I am no longer surprised that Saint Paul should have lost his head after his strange vision."

- Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm on the six-year old Mozart, quoted in The Lives of the Great Composers, pg. 95.

A Ball of Shit

The family priest taught the young Rameau how to speak and read, so that the strange child could learn the Bible. Through this knowledge of language he was soon able to understand the holy man's philosophy, which, in brief, was that the world was a ball of shit adrift in a sea of sin and the sooner one passed to heaven the better. As the Gelreesh confessed, he took these lessons to heart, and so later in life when he helped free his patients' souls from excremental bondage, he felt he was actually doing them a great favor. It was from that bald and jowly man of God that the creature became acquainted with the power of pity.

- from "The Beautiful Gelreesh" by Jeffrey Ford (2003)

Correct answers

"There was a restaurant critic who, when asked his opinion of certain Italian wines, answered that he drank only French wines. We may as well have restaurant writers who are vegetarians, or who eat only kosher food, or who cannot be bothered with fish because of the bones.

And when our critics are not averting their noses from what they did not learn to like at their mothers' knees or on the grand tour, they reserve judgment on what they eat until they have looked it up to see if it was made according to Hoyle. ... Some of these critics have never lost touch with their earliest educations, when the correct answers were in the back of the book."

- Seymour Britchky on restaurant criticism. His comments seem equally applicable to literary criticism.