#249

“I have called the Dichter the keeper of metamorphoses: but he is a keeper in a further sense as well. In a world of achievement and specialization, a world that sees nothing bu peaks, towards which one strives in a kind of linear focus that exerts all strength o the cold solicitude of the peaks which scorning and blurring the adjacent things, the many, the real things, which do not offer themselves for any help towards the peaks – in a world that prohibits metamorphosis more and more because it hinders the overall goal of production, which heedlessly multiplies the means of its self-destruction while simultaneously attempting to stifle whatever earlier human qualities are still extant – in such a world, which one might label the most blinded of all worlds, it seems of cardinal significance that there are people who, nonetheless, still keep practicing the gift of metamorphosis” (id, 161-162).

#248

“I feel distrustful of both the man who merely writes and the man who self-complaisantly still labels himself as a Dicther (...) For in reality, no man today can be a writer, a Dichter, if he does not seriously doubt his right to be one” (id, 157).

#247

“People are only defenseless only when they have no experience or no memory” (Canetti, 1986: 13).

CANETTI, Elias (1986). The Conscience Of Words. Translation by Joachim Neugroschel. London: André Deutsch Limited.