• rhetoric and poetic
• theorizing

And it is now that our two paths cross.
Both simultaneously recognize his Anti-type: that I am an Arcadian, that he is a Utopian. . . .
He would like to see me cleaning latrines: I would like to see him removed to some other planet.
Neither speaks. What experience could we possibly share? . . . .
. . .a rendezvous between two accomplices who, in spite of themselves, cannot resist meeting
to remind the other (do both, at bottom, desire truth?) of that half of their secret which he would most like to forget
forcing us both, for a fraction of a second, to remember our victim (but for him I could forget the blood, but for me he could forget the innocence),
on whose immolation (call him Abel, Remus, whom you will, it is one Sin Offering) arcadias, utopias, our dear old bag of a democracy are alike founded:
For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand.

from W. H. Auden, Horae Canonicae: "Vespers" (1954)

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