Jim’s Reviews > Complete Essays, Vol. I: 1920-1925 > Status Update

Mozart is one of those composers who expresses something (in his most important works, at any rate) which one feels to be qualitatively valuable, as well as unaffected and having a certain purity and integrity. This thing he expresses in forms of the most amazing originality, beauty, and delicacy.

One of the chief drawbacks of being a great man is the fact that, during your life and for long centuries after it, you are doomed to be the prey of innumerable small men who dissect you, re-invent you, use you as propaganda, slobber over you, abuse you, take the credit of you, make money out of you.

It is only in the last four or five cenuries that music has existed as an independent and self-sufficient art. Why it ever emerged from its preharmonic childhood is a mystery; and why, considering the fact that the vast majority of human beings are now seen to be capable of appreciating the most elaborate forms of music, why the art did not grow up much earlier is a still greater mystery.

Ulysses is one of the dullest books ever written, and one of the least significant. This is due to the total absence from the book of any sort of conflict and to the absolutely static nature of the characters. Bloom is consistently and statically unpleasant.

The Renaissance ... manifested itself in different countries by different symptoms. In Italy, [it] was more than anything an outburst of painting, architecture, and sculpture. Scholarship and religious reformation were in Germany the typical manifestation... But when this gorgeous measles crossed the English Channel, its symptoms were almost exclusively literary.