To be young and upright again

“Classicists cannot soil themselves with simple-minded seeing the way empirics do: empirics are too dewy, eager, brash, young, innocent, naive. No. And not because experience couldn’t bring them to wisdom better than the Greeks, either, but because experience is broad and muddy like the Ganges, with the filthy and the holy intermixed in every wash; because it is itself the puzzle and the surd; because it teaches primarily through pain, defeat, disappointment, loss; and these leave a groveler inside the heart; to preside in the spirit, they appoint a hanging judge; and create a resentful cripple in the mind, bent to one side in the continuous clutch of its truth.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel