How do we corrupt the youth? To start we give them, when they are teenage boys, George Steiner’s introduction to Kafka:
Intercourse, as we find it pictured in The Trial and The Castle, has the crass ambiguity of rape. It humiliates men more than women. It leaves them irreparably soiled and enfeebled.
And follow it up with “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
And wait, arms folded, to see who will cut a hole through all that to let the air in.
