Published on December 28 2008, Books-Authors

(Full text of a lecture delivered in edited versions at the Punjab University, Lahore, the
Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, and referred to in discussions at Beacon House
University, Lahore, and at Karachi University by the Sialkot-born poet and novelist
during his visit to Pakistan in November 2008 when Oxford University Press launched
his new book of selected essays titled Beckett’s)
I OFTEN thought of you, the students at universities in Pakistan, when, for 38
years, I was a professor at the University of Texas. During my earlier years in
Texas, in the 1970s, all my students were exclusively of AngloSaxon or
European origin and sometimes, seeing their eyes light up when some
interesting idea had been expressed, I would think of you, the thought vaguely
crossing my mind that I could be sharing with you the ideas which were arousing
the enthusiasm of my American students.

By the early 21st century, during my last few years at the university, the
complexion of the American population had changed; the names in my class
rosters were no longer just John and Mary, Paul and Sarah, but also Ameena
and Rahman, Ayesha and Qureishi. This sometimes encouraged the illusion that
I was in Karachi or Lahore, not in Austin, Texas, and left me oddly disappointed
that it was only an illusion. I felt a sense of regret that if there was anything
valuable in my teaching it was not being transmitted to my fellow countrymen and
women.

Over the years I have received poems and stories from many a young person in
Pakistan who has sought my opinion and hoped that I could somehow get them
published. Almost invariably, the work has been very poor. Whenever possible, I
have written back detailed criticism; but one does not always have the luxury of
sufficient free time to reply to everyone. Again, I have been left feeling a sense of
regret that I have not been with you so that we can discuss what it is we do when
we write poet ry and fiction.

Now that I am here, allow me to address a few remarks concerning literature and
writing. Young Pakistani writers have struck me as no different from young
American writers in the shortcomings that their early work reveals. They are keen
to have their own work published but neglect to read much of what has already
been published. They seem to believe that they have important ideas which will
astonish the world but do not realize that literature, as Mallarmé said to Degas, is
not made up of ideas but of words.

The young writers’ acquaintance with literature, what little there is of it, has been
in the classroom where the discussion centers upon socio-political ideas or an
interpretation passionately argued in the jargon of some trendy French guru.
Therefore, I say to you: your writing comes from your experience of the world and
your special place in it; your experience comes to you through your senses and
what your senses receive are not ideas but a complex perception of things; ideas
are a function of language, not of reality, and when you create an interesting
language to represent that reality then, and only then, you will have created
interesting ideas. This has been said by many other writers, it is to them a self-
evident truth.

Writers, states Roberto Calasso in his book Literature and the Gods, ‘are the only
ones who know the territory well’ and giving a long list of them, which includes
Baudelaire, Proust, Valéry, Auden, Yeats, Borges, Nabokov and Calvino, a
remarkably diverse international group, Calasso adds: ‘we immediately sense…
that they are all talking about the same thing... they know that the literature
they’re talking about is not to be recognised by its observance of any theory, but
rather by a certain vibration or luminescence of the sentence’ — a glorious
phrase that, lumines cence of the sentence.

Conrad talks about ‘the shape and ring of sentences’ in the preface to one his
novels; Flaubert refers to ‘sentences that make me swoon’ — two variations of
luminescence.

Nabokov said in his Lectures on Don Quixote, ‘the only thing that really matters
in this business of literature — the mysterious thrill of art, the impact of aesthetic
bliss.’ Flaubert wrote in a letter, ‘As for me, I fail to understand how those people
exist who are not from morning to night in an aesthetic state. I have enjoyed
more than many the pleasures of family, as much as any man my age the
pleasures of the senses, more than many the pleasures of love. But I know of no
delight to compare by that given me by some of the illustrious dead whose works
I have read or seen.’ (To Louise Colet: Oct 3, 1846).

The pleasure that Flaubert and Nabokov are referring to is that of language itself,
that moment of ecstasy experienced by the mind when an expression, an image
or a rhythm brings to it a sudden surge of pleasure.

Longinus, writing his treatise On the Sublime almost 2,000 years ago, stated that
‘the Sublime consists in a consummate excellence and distinction of language,
and that this alone gave to the greatest poets and prose writers their
preeminence.’ In 1815, Goethe stated, ‘An art attains to supreme heights when
its subject is a matter of indifference and the art itself truly absolute, with the
subject-matter merely its vehicle.’ In 1858, George Eliot wrote in a letter to her
publisher: ‘The soul of art lies in its treatment and not in its subject.’ Eight years
later, in another letter, she wrote, ‘I think aesthetic teaching is the highest of all
teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be
purely aesthetic — if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram — it
becomes the most offensive of all teaching.’ It is not ideas, not merely the
content, but style, what we call the writer’s unique voice when it uses language in
a compellingly distinctive form, which generates the aesthetic bliss.

No one can give a young writer a formula for acquiring a distinctive style. It is an
evolutionary process dependent upon wide reading; the more you read the more
your mind is engaged in a natural selection of those forms which the peculiar
constitution of your unique brain finds most desirable. To be an original writer you
have to be a highly learned person: originality is not a gift but a function of
knowledge: an original form is a new combination of older forms as can be seen
in the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot.

In his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ Eliot remarks that we value a
poet’s originality when we observe ‘those aspects of his work in which he least
resembles anyone else’; but, adds Eliot, ‘we shall often find that not only the
best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead
poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.’ You cannot be a
writer without first immersing yourself in tradition, and tradition, says Eliot,
‘cannot be inherited,… you must obtain it by great labour.’ Writing his essay early
in the 20th century, Eliot expected the new poet ‘to write not merely with his own
generation in his bones’ but with the knowledge that the whole of the literature of
Europe from Homer had to be an essential component of his training. Nearly a
century later, we would not wish to confine ourselves to the literature of Europe
as our inherited tradition (though I would add as an important aside that, of
course, for writers in the English language the European tradition is the primary
one); today our concept of tradition is global and there are works of great beauty
that have originated from a non-European background which it would be foolish
to ignore.

It is only by exposing one’s mind to the greatest possible variety of forms in

which literature has been produced in the past and by experimenting with forms
that attract one that a writer can discover that form which most appropriately
captures and projects that imagistic content of that writer’s subject matter. After
Virginia Woolf had already published Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she
hit upon the original form of The Waves and after completing it she recorded in
her diary: ‘I think I am about to embody at last the exact shapes my brain holds.
What a long toil to reach this begin ning — if The Waves is my first work in my
own style!’ Your brain is unique. Locked within it is your unique way of seeing
reality. You cannot release that unique perception by repeating a previously
established formula. You have to find, as Flaubert said of himself ‘the special
language of which I alone have the key’. Proust expresses the same idea when
he says, ‘Every writer is obliged to create his own language, just as every violinist
is obliged to create his own sound’.’ And you do not do that by following the
prescriptions of creative writing textbooks or of teachers. Prescriptions are for a
whole class of people and have an implied aim of turning you to a conformist.
Your are not a conformist, you are an individual. Dissent, rejection of current
trends, rebellion against any tyranny are your inviolable rights. Laurence Sterne,
Diderot, Pushkin… a long list of writers we now accept as irrefutably great, right
down to Beckett, were non-conformist, but it is to them that we owe our delight in
literature, which is essentially a delight in envisioning new forms in which reality
is depicted.
Roberto Calasso says of form that it is ‘the base beneath all bases when one
speaks of literature’. He calls it an ‘elusive base’ which is ‘intrinsically incapable
of being translated into some definition’. Yet it is the principal obsession of all
human beings — to give to the mysterious reality in which we find ourselves a
form that makes it, at least provisionally, acceptable as meaningful experience.
Whether we are painters, composers, writers, physicists, astronomers or just
plain ordinary folk, we are all engaged in assembling, sometimes in a traditional
formula that is prescribed by religious dogma and sometimes in a radically new
rearrangement that begins by questioning established beliefs, the images that
constitute our reality. Proust says in his great novel: ‘We have of the universe
only inchoate, fragmentary visions, which we complement by arbitrary
associations of ideas, creative of dangerous illusions.’ The painter Sean Scully
has said of his remarkable abstract work, ‘I’m con stantly trying to create a sense
of physical certainty in a slipping, sliding reality.’ We are constantly reshaping the
world. Our intellect is excited when a scientist comes up with a new theory about
the universe or when a Beckett or a Borges produces a new literary form; our
imagination is thrilled when the scene before us is represented in a new form.

The ideas that I have been expressing had become commonplace by the mid
20th century. By 1960 it was taken for granted by any serious young writer that it
was ludicrous to write fiction as if Joyce had never existed. Alain Robbe-Grillet
had laid the 19th century to rest in his 1957 essay, ‘On Several Obsolete
Notions’, and advanced the post-Joycean aesthetic of the new novel. What was
commonplace almost 50 years ago seems to have been overtaken by a sort of
intellectual amnesia brought about by the aggressive marketing of the products
of popular culture, the importance of which has been inflated by television
because of its mass appeal and selling potential. We are supposed to appreciate
popular culture because it is presented as an art form relevant to our time and
what used to be considered serious art is now labelled ‘elitist’, a word presumed
to be pejorative. Far from being a disqualification, ignorance is lauded as a
democratic virtue.

Well, it is your choice, whether you wish to write because the example of a Woolf
or a Beckett has filled you with an ambition to emulate them or because you have
a craving for fame and will be content to produce hack work to achieve it.

Your freedom to be an artist of whatever kind is a sacred principle which no one

may challenge. Indeed, the quality of your work will bear a relationship with how
deliberately, stubbornly and unwaveringly you resist ideological pressure and
assert your freedom to serve no cause, to accept no censorship, but only to be
yourself. Listen to what Chekhov said back in 1888:

‘I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a gradualist, not a monk, not an

indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more…. I hate lying and
violence, whatever form they take... stupidity and tyranny reign not in
shopkeepers’ homes and in lock-ups alone: I see them in science, in literature… I
regard trademarks and labels as prejudicial. My holy of holies is the human body,
health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom — freedom
from force and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.’
Chekhov made that statement when Russia was ruled by a czar, when monarchy
and absolute freedom were contradictory terms; then came the revolution, then
came the Soviet Union, and we all know what happened then: any writer or
thinker who did not toe the party line, who did not follow the official religion of
Communism, was punished — Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov: we will never
forget the names of the writers who suffered abuse, humiliation and exile
because they refused to compromise their intellectual freedom, but we have
already forgotten the scores of writers who slavishly wrote according to the
formula prescribed by the state that had made Communism a strictly enforced
religion. Chekhov was remarkably prescient, for in another letter from 1888 we
read:

‘Under the banner of science, art, and a protest against the suppression of free
thought, among us in Russia there will reign toads and crocodiles of a sort that
even Spain did not know at the time of the Inquisition. Well, you will see it!
Narrow-mindedness, great pretensions, inordinate self-love, and complete
absence of a literary and social conscience will do their work.’ That is exactly
what happened in the Soviet Union. And, I regret to say, it continues to happen in
some countries where the state takes on a piously patrician role to keep the
people within the narrow confines of an absolutist ideology. As if some
prelapsarian integrity had to be maintained! On the contrary, we should welcome
dissent, for just as there is no progress in science without some orthodoxy being
challenged, so in art, and indeed in any civilised society, however distasteful or
obnoxious a heresy might at first appear, we may scorn it or even ignore it but we
must never question the right of the individual to express it.

Hart Crane wrote in a letter in 1924: ‘the freedom of my imagination is the most
precious thing that life holds for me, — and the only reason I can see for living.’ I
trust that the idea of absolute freedom is universally accepted as the starting
point for any artist setting out to create some meaningful new work. Turn now to
the other great master, Henry James, also writing in the 1880s, and also
asserting the notion of the artist’s freedom. He wrote in his The Art of Fiction:
‘The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel… is that it be
interesting... The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result… strike
me as innumerable, and such as can only suffer from being marked out or fenced
in by prescription.’ Henry James insists that you have to be free to say whatever
you wish to say. Your work, writes James, will have ‘no intensity at all, and
therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say.’ It is you who is the
maker, you who create the new form to present your vision of reality, and, says
James, there should be ‘no limit’ to what you may attempt, no limit to your
‘possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.’ It is after you have done
your bit of creation that the reader estimates your quality and applies ‘the test of
execution’: the question always is — how well have you done it, do you surprise
us with your vision of the mystery of reality while at the same time affirming our
idea of it? Whatever you say, whatever the formal experiment you are
attempting, your work must always have ‘the air of reality’, there must be in it a
‘solidity of specification’, you must always produce ‘the illusion of life’. That, says
James, is ‘the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist’.

James dismisses those who maintain that the writer must serve some cause or
that the novel should preach some pre-packaged morality. With the wonderful
defiance of the great writer, he declares: ‘There are bad novels and good novels,
as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in
which I see any meaning.’ As for different kinds of novels, ‘the only classification
of the novel,’ says James, ‘that I can understand is into that which has life and
that which has it not’.

The novel, or indeed any work of art, which has life is the one that comes from
the individual self attempting to comprehend what Milan Kundera calls ‘the
enigma of the self’, and it is only in the context of a complete freedom from any
ideological prescription or censor ship that the individual can best make that
attempt. Even an affiliation to some school of thought with its loudly proclaimed
manifesto — be it Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism, Naturalism — prevents the
individual from discovering the forms particular to its own self.

Form and style are difficult concepts to define, yet they are the constant
preoccupation of writers. Nabokov says that ‘Style is not a tool, it is not a method,
it is not a choice of words alone. Being much more than all this, style constitutes
an intrinsic component or characteristic of an author’s personality. Thus when we
speak of style we mean an individual artist’s peculiar nature, and way it
expresses itself in his artistic output. It is essential to remember that though
every living person may have his or her style, it is the style peculiar to this or that
individual writer of genius that is alone worth discussion.’ (Lectures on
Literature).

The problem for the teacher of literature, however, is what to say when
discussing a writer’s style. T. S. Eliot said of Dante that all we can do is to point
to him as at a monument and remain silent. Nabokov himself, when he was
teaching Dickens, said in a lecture: ‘I would like to devote the 50 minutes of every
class meeting to mute meditation, concentration and admiration of Dickens.…All
we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over.
Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the
shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of
emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science.’
Because a discussion of a writer’s style leads to a sort of pious silence in which
the initiates sit smiling benignly at one another in a communal glow, or to
unhelpful remarks like Nabokov’s about artistic delight, teachers therefore submit
the work to a theoretical analysis or start talking about its socio-political context.
But as Nabokov says, ‘The study of the sociological or political impact of
literature has to be devised mainly for those who are by temperament or
education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature.’ William
Faulkner says that all a writer can do is ‘to portray the human heart in some
simple struggle with itself, with others, or with its environment’, and as to the
great questions of one’s time, he says, ‘The sociological qualities are only, in my
opinion, coincidental to the story — the story is still the story of the human being,
the human heart struggling.’ (Faulkner at West Point).

For the writer, it is the pattern, the structure, ‘the inner weave’ that matters. It is
not ideas, but design that interests the writer. Nabokov states this emphatically
and memorably: ‘Literature consists, in fact, not of general ideas but of particular
revelations, not of schools of thought but of individuals of genius.’ And lecturing
on Gogol he says, ‘[Gogol’s] work, as all great literary achievements, is a
phenomenon of language and not one of ideas.’ Now I would like to address a
few remarks to those among you who write poems in the English language. An
important aspect of English poetry that you might observe is how, beginning with
Chaucer who was indebted to Italian sources, it is nourished by the poetry of
other languages. Western literature thrives on discovering the new. English-
language poets, especially in the 20th century, have accessed the new by
accepting cross-cultural pollination, and when we study the great poets — Yeats,
Eliot, Pound, and some more recent contemporaries — we find that without
exception each one of them owes his or her strength to the absorption of a wide
range of international influences.

Secondly, the history of English poetry is a history of a succession of revolutions.

‘Tradition’, says Octavio Paz, ‘is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp
breaks.’ We have a succession of –isms: Romanticism, Naturalism, Symbolism,
Surrealism, etc. Each break is a new generation’s revolt against the previous one
and is seen as progress. And with each new group we value most the originators
with whom that movement is identified: Pope and Dryden, Coleridge and
Wordsworth, Eliot and Pound: they made it new for their time and their formal
approach was followed by a host of imitators who derived their temporary high
reputation from having the appearance of modernity.

Now, if you, wherever you live, are writing poems in English, then your first
obligation to yourself is to do what Chaucer or Eliot did: read the best literature of
your time wherever it comes from and see if you cannot take some old form and
make it new for your time. Next, the fact that you were born where you were and
live where you do is, of course, important because much of your character and
thinking is shaped by your environment. There is a complex of memories in your
unconscious, the universal racial archetypes that Jung describes as well as
memories of local association. Next, the fact that you were born in Pakistan not
only gives you the memories I refer to, but also places you in a particular cultural
context. And that is what gives you that extra dimension which is uniquely yours.
To give you an example of what I mean. Unlike the English used by Eliot and
Pound, who lived mostly in Europe and drew on European cosmopolitan culture,
William Carlos Williams used American speech rhythms in his poems, Hart
Crane wanted jazz rhythms in his poem, ‘The Bridge’ as did Jack Kerouac in his
novel, On the Road, and some of the Beat poets also wanted to be distinctively
American in their use of English.

I was listening, as I often do, to a disc of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The words of the
song began, ‘Tum agar yuhi nazren milate rahen’, sung in a very compelling
rhythm, and I asked myself, why hadn’t Pakistani poets in English attempted
creating such a rhythm in their poems? I am ignorant of Urdu prosody but
listening to that song I thought the rhythm was not unlike the sound of dactylic
metre in English.

There is an interrelation between poetry and music. The famous modern

example is Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ where each of the four poems has five
movements, each movement in a different rhythm. I was drawn to that idea when
I was a schoolboy in London in the early 1950s and had become so attracted to
western classical music that I spent my pocket money going to the Proms at
Albert Hall in the summer. I remember being impressed by a horn concerto and
writing a poem in which its rhythms are supposed to be echoed. I don’t think it
worked, but the idea of experimenting with musical forms remained an
obsession.

A few years later, I wrote one of my first successful poems, the one called ‘This
Landscape, These People’. It is in three parts, like a symphony in three
movements. The second part is so written as to be faster than the other two. The
choice of words, the use of metrical devices, the usual tricks of rhymes, half-
rhymes and off-rhymes, and assonance and dissonance, a lot of techniques in
fact are there to be experimented with to create the particular music of a poem.

Experimentation is the lifeblood of discovery and I’ve seen little evidence of

Pakistani writers experimenting. No, I’m not asking for those quaint little phrases
which have a Pakistani ‘flavour’; nor for the occasional Urdu word, which often
ends up by sounding like fake authenticity; ethnic dressing up is an awful form of
sentimentality. What I’m suggesting is a rigorous working out of a form in a
carefully built rhythm that, derived from techniques in Urdu literature, is a new
and persuasive sound in the ear listening to English. You should also try your
hand at such traditional forms as the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina; play with
stanza forms such as terza rima and Spenserian stanzas; and so on. Of course,
no one is asking you to write in ancient forms, but your mastery of those forms
will make you a superior poet. Robert Lowell trained himself rigorously and then
let himself loose, so that the freedom he thus discovered led to the creation of
neatly restrained measures which yet have the appearance of being formally
unconstrained and perfectly natural.
Imagistic content comprises the heart of English literature. When we create an
image, we dive into the interior lake of the self where our memories are stored
and occasionally bring up a pearl. ‘Memory,’ said Paul Valéry, is the substance of
all thought.’ And in his book Symbols of Transformation, Jung presents his theory
of the universal prevalence of racial archetypes which appear as images in our
dreams and mythologies.

People in Pakistan often ask me why I do not write more about Pakistan, why my
novels are not set here. If I may offer a personal explanation: I was born in
Sialkot and spent my first seven years there, the next 10 in Bombay. The rest of
my life has been spent in the West. Most people in Pakistan see me as someone
who has become disconnected from Pakistan, and they point to several of my
novels as confirmation of my alienation because the novels are set in South
America. But look again. Yes, the surface is that of South America (though not
always). But look a little more closely at the language, at the images. Most, if not
all, of the stories are inventions and the characters are also inventions. But still
my attempt to create a fiction, because the transmission of the story is coming
via my brain, is necessarily going to have layers of meaning that come out of my
unconscious. And my unconscious is filled with a great deal of reading and with
those images which are the archetypes particular to people where I was born.
And what are they?

You’ve only got to review the history of the Punjab to answer that. A Punjabi’s
history did not begin in 1947; as with any other human being on the planet, his
history began thousands of years ago, and where I was born it would be the
height of ignorance to think that among my ancestors there were no Greeks,
Mongols, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Mughals, Persians, Afghans, and God knows
who else. You don’t have to be a Jungian to believe that a Punjabi’s collective
unconscious may well have traces of some or all of those sources. Just look at
the crazy, surprising, wildly improbable, and often inexplicable images in your
dreams. A good deal of such unconscious matter is there in my novels wherever
they are set.

If you look at my novel, The Triple Mirror of the Self, you will, even when you
might be looking at an Andean view, be seeing something else. I describe a
strange episode in that novel in a strange place called Kailost. Look again, dear
reader; so far only one person I know has noticed that the letters that make up
the name Kailost also make up the name of another city.

In the same episode I have a character whom I call Mokhwa Jaghès; the accent
on the e might distract the reader, but you might notice that the first name ends
with ‘khwa’ and the surname begins with ‘ja’, and the combination produces
‘Khwaja’; at this point you might remember that the author’s surname is spelled
‘Ghose’, and that might alert you to the presence of those letters in ‘Mokhwa
Jaghès’, which will thus give you ‘Khwaja M. Ghose’, which happens to be my
father’s name, the ‘M’ standing for ‘Mohammed’. All of this was not pre-planned,
it just developed as I was writing.

These archetypal images are there in all of us, but how are you to access them in
your poems and stories? The worst approach is to do so self-consciously. That is
like going around with a label on your chest telling people who you are. The best
approach is to concentrate on the imagistic content of your language. You let it
happen naturally, spontaneously. If you make a deliberate attempt to fill your
lines or your sentences with sharply drawn and fresh images (as opposed to
dead metaphors) the unconscious part of you will naturally come into play and
suggest surprising and unexpected ideas, and that is where the richest part of
literature is to be found, that is when we are dazzled by a luminescence so
intense it is a sort of spiritual beauty.

One final plea to you the future writers and teachers of Pakistan. Political
freedom, freedom from any form of repression or censorship, is a precondition for
the flourishing of any art or science.

No one is going to be morally corrupted by any expression of the human intellect

or imagination, be it a new theory of the universe that rejects some established
dogma, be it a painting of a naked person, or be it a novel that mocks or ridicules
or satirises a society’s received ideas. No one has anything to lose from such
perceptions of reality. As Faulkner said, ‘If the mind has got to be protected by
the law from what will harm it, then it can’t be very much of a mind to begin with.’
The very concept of blasphemy has become redundant and irrelevant in civilised
countries; that any country should have a law against it would be laughable and
indicative of acute anxiety and insecurity about what was being protected were
the consequences of such a restriction of human liberty not so awfully tragic. We
should celebrate the human intellect, rejoice at what it produces; not proscribe it,
not flaunt the barbarian’s attachment to ignorance and doctrinal prejudice in
gleeful book-burning frenzies.

Perhaps the younger generation might need reminding of examples from recent
history — of the horrors that transpired in the Soviet Union and its satellites in the
name of its official religion, Communism, of the terror inflicted by military dictators
in Argentina, Brazil and Chile in the mid-20th century that drove intellectuals and
artists into exile if they escaped being tortured and killed. Too often in history the
worst enemy of a people has been its government.

You are the custodians of the pure air of learning and of the creative spirit. Don’t
let the soot of bigotry and the noxious gas of entrenched orthodoxy pollute that
precious air.