From "Introduction to The Best American Poetry 1993," by Louise Glück

Watching the returns from Iowa last night, I was also reading some essays by Louise Glück, and ran across this:

I preferred the cleanliness of powerlessness, but the refusal of power differs from lack of power; it places one among the elect to whom a choice is given. This particular mode, this life on the sidelines, preferably the very front of the sidelines, with the best view of the errors of others, promotes feelings of deeply satisfying moral rectitude combined with an invigorating sense of injustice: the particular limitations and insufficiencies and blindnesses of one's own preferences are never exposed because those preferences are never enacted.


New Year's resolution: Leave the sidelines this year.