Do we, looking around us, see any lives which approach the mythic levels of heroism, which we can imagine as fit subjects for bards instead of press agents?  To ask the question is to answer it.  It is absurd.  We have reached a point where it is impossible to tell the true hero (or prophet) from the false.  The media treats them all the same.

But in cultural history, just as in political history, we may know very little of what will eventually turn out to be important.  The very first issue of this magazine, in 1923, devoted a book review to two new works, Ulysses and  "The Waste Land,"  and complained of them both:  "There is a new kind of literature abroad in the land, whose only obvious fault is that no one can understand it."  Franz Kafka left his unpublished masterpieces to be burned by a friend, and most of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical works appeared only posthumously.  For all we know, the most important writers and artists of this century, perhaps the greatest thinkers too, remain almost completely unknown, maybe living in poverty and obscurity like Bela Bartok and Vladimir Nabokov in the 1940's, or maybe already long dead.