WEBVTT

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This is part of the
last stanza and the end

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of a poem by Wallace Stevens
called Esthetique du Mal,

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The Aesthetic of Evil.

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The greatest poverty is not
to live in a physical world,

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to feel that one's desire is too
difficult to tell from despair.

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Perhaps after death
the non-physical people

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in paradise, itself
non-physical,

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may by chance observe
the green corn gleaming

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and experience the
minor of what we feel.

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The adventure in
humanity has not

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conceived of a race completely
physical in a physical world.

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The green corn gleams,
and the metaphysicals

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lie sprawling in
majors of the August

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heat, the rotund emotions,
paradise unknown.

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This is the thesis
scrivened in delight,

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the reverberating
sound, the right corral.

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One might have thought
of sight, but who

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could think of what it sees,
for all the ill it sees?

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Speech found the ear,
for all the evil sound,

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but the dark italics
it could not propound.

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And out of what
one sees and hears

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and out of what one feels,
who could have thought

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to make so many selves, so many
sensuous worlds, as if the air,

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the midday air, was swarming
with the metaphysical changes

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that occur merely in living
as and where we live?

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Thanks.

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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you.

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