Volume 12, Number 3 · February 13, 1969
Reflections on Fiction
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Art, of course, lives in history. We are obliged to consent that a work is not today what it was yesterday, neither as a whole nor in its details. It is easy enough to agree that time alters the past and all its terms, but the agreement is rather abstract. In taste, as in love, the preferences are violent and few are willing to look ahead, to profit from experience. We have little power over our own sensibilities, even though they appear to us as singular and personal as our bodies. We know our ideas and likes to be formed by the present and yet it is hard to resist a belief that they are somehow in touch with eternity.
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