‘Crawling at your feet,’ said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), ‘you may observe a Bread-and-butter-fly. It’s wings are thin slices of bread-and-butter, it’s body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.’

‘And what does it live on?’

‘Weak tea with cream in it.’

A new difficulty came into Alice’s head. ‘Supposing it couldn’t find any?’ she suggested.

‘Then it would die, of course.’

‘But that must happen very often,’ Alice remarked thoughtfully.

‘It always happens,’ said the Gnat.

–Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter III

When I re-enter, alone, the city’s crush
and its chaos of noise
and the fury of traffic surrounds me,
may I, above that hammering confusion,
remember sky and the mountain slopes
where the herds are still descending homeward.

May my courage be like those rocks
and the shepherd’s daylong work seem possible to me —
the way he drifts and darkens, and with a well-aimed stone
hems in his flock where it unravels.
With slow and steady strides, his posture is pensive
and, as he stands there, noble. Even now a god might
secretly slip into this form and not be diminished.

In turn, he lingers and moves on like the day itself,
and cloud shadows pass through him, as though all of space
were thinking slow thoughts for him.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

How is it that people go around
and pick up random things
and carry them about? Like the porter
who heaves market baskets from stall to stall
as they keep filling up, and he lugs his burden
and never asks, Sir, for whom is this feast?

How is it that one just stands here, like that shepherd,
so exposed to the energies of the universe,
so integral to the streaming events of space
that simply leaning against a tree in the landscape
gives him his destiny; he need do nothing more.
And yet he lacks in his restless gaze
the tranquil solace of the herd,
has nothing but world, world, each time he looks up,
world in each downward glance.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

From these clouds, that carelessly cover
the star that just was there —
from these mountains over there, now, for a while,
taken by the night —
from this river on the valley floor,
that glimmers with the sky’s broken light —
from me and all of this: to make one thing.

From me and from the feel of the flock
brought back to the fold, to outlast
the great dark closing down of the world —
from me and from each flicker of light
from the shadowed houses — God, to make one thing.

From the strangers, among whom I know not one, God,
and from me, from me —
to make one thing. From all the slumbering ones,
coughing old men in the hospice,
sleep-drunken children in crowded beds,
from me and all I don’t know,
to make the thing, oh God, God, that thing,
that, half-heaven, half-earth, gathers into its gravity
only the sum of flight,
weighing nothing but arrival.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

Prime Contact,although nice conduct return cause expensive certainly arrangement half create place former low iron ready kill no cover gas nevertheless occur save some themselves meet seem roll instead instance slow record mass experience amount price content let wonder secretary lot weapon lay hope while space absolutely appropriate south division application labour conduct context dry also drive appoint recall present extremely its against studio text recognition after complete challenge funny facility concentrate her failure push ship latter feature scene flow end no difficult lovely blue shall employee activity contact short failure this speech

It seems to me that all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we feel as paralysis because we can no longer experience our banished feelings. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us, because we feel momentarily abandoned by what we’ve believed and grown accustomed to; because we can’t keep standing as the ground shifts under our feet. That is why the sadness passes over like a wave. The new presence inside us, that which has come to us, has entered our heart, has found its way to its innermost chamber, and is no longer even there — it is already in our blood. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be persuaded that nothing happened, and yet something has changed inside us, as a house changes when a guest comes into it. We cannot say who has entered, we may never know, but there are many indications that the future enters us in just this way, to transform itself within us long before it happens. That is why it is so important to be alone and attentive when you are sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than any loud and accidental point of time which occurs, as it were, from the outside.

— Rilke, Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

There is my window.
I awoke just now so gently, I thought I was floating off.
How far does my life extend
and where does night begin?

I could believe that everything
surrounding me is I,
transparent as a crystal,
dark and still as a crystal’s depths.

I could contain within me
all the stars; so vast
is my heart, so gladly
it let him go again, the one

I have perhaps begun to love,
perhaps to hold.
Strange and unimagined,
my fate turns toward me.

What am I? Set down
like this in such immensity,
fragrant as a meadow,
moved by each passing breeze.

Calling out, yet fearful
that my call will be heard,
and destined to be drowned
in another’s life.

— Rilke, New Poems

A tree rose there. What pure arising.
Oh, Orpheus sings! Now I can hear the tree.
Then all went silent. But even in the silence
was signal, beginning, change.

Out of the stillness of the unbound forest,
animals came forth from dens and nests.
And it was not fear or cunning
that made them be so quiet,

but the desire to listen. Every cry, howl, roar
was stilled inside them. And where
not even a hut stood

or the scantest shelter
to contain their ineffable longing,
you made them, from their listening, a temple.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, I

The almond trees in bloom: all we can accomplish here is to ever know ourselves in our earthly appearance.

I endlessly marvel at you, blissful ones — at your demeanor, the way you bear your vanishing adornment with timeless purpose. Ah, to understand how to bloom: then would the heart be carried beyond all milder dangers, to be consoled in the great one.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

It is good that you are about to enter a profession [the military] that will make you self-sufficient and set you on your own feet. Wait patiently to see if your inner life narrows in the grip of this profession. I consider it to be a very difficult and challenging one, for it is greatly burdened with conventions and allows little room for personal interpretations of its duties. But in the midst of these very unfamiliar conditions your inner solitude will be a support and a home to you. It will be the starting point of all your journeys.

— Rilke, Worpswede, July 16, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

How delicious it is to wake up in a place where no one, no one in the world, guesses where you are. Sometimes I have stopped spontaneously in towns along my way only to taste the delight that no living being can imagine me there. How much that added to the lightness of my soul!

I remember certain days in Cordova where I lived as if transparent, because I was completely unknown. The sweetness of staying in a little Spanish town, if only to relate to certain dogs and a blind beggar — more dangerous, that blind man, because he can read you. But three days later, if he hears you come back toward his church at the same hour, he counts you now as someone who henceforth exists, and he incorporates you into his world of sound.

And there you are, destined to new birth, mystical and nocturnal.

— Rilke, Letter to a friend
February 3, 1923

Narcissus vanished. All that remained
was the fragrance of his beauty —
constant and sweet, the scent of heliotrope.
His task was only to behold himself.

Whatever emanated from from him he loved back into himself.
He no longer drifted in the open wind,
but enclosed himself in a narrowing circle
and there, in its grip, he extinguished himself.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

So was “At the Movies” — which was also called “Sneak Previews,” “Siskel and Ebert,” “Ebert and Roeper” and other names during its long, storied run — the start of a slippery downward slope or the summit of the critical art? Neither, of course. The circumstances in which the art of criticism is practiced are always changing, but the state of the art is remarkably constant.

Which is to say that, from a certain angle, the future of criticism is always bleak and the present always a riot of ill-informed opinion and boisterous disputation. Some gloomy soul will always wish it otherwise and conjure an idealized picture of decorum and good sense. Early in the last century, T. S. Eliot wrote that “upon giving the matter a little attention, we perceive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences.”

A hundred years before Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge thundered that “till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their taste and judgment.”

Both Coleridge and Eliot, who were writing about print, sound uncannily like ranters against the Internet and television. And, like present-day old-media scourges of the blogosphere, they had a point. But they were also projecting an impossible and self-undermining wish, because it is only through the confusion and noise of the public sphere that criticism has advanced, discovering its principles and best practices, preserving tradition and embracing the new.

I don’t go back into the archive of Siskel and Ebert’s reviews to find out how they voted, or for consumer advice, but rather to hear the two of them argue. And in our own brief tenure in their chairs, Mr. Phillips and I found argument to be the biggest challenge and the greatest satisfaction.

“One minute for the cross-talk, guys,” the producer would say, using the show’s term of art for the back-and-forth that follows the scripted reviews. How can you do a movie justice in 60 seconds? You can’t, of course — or in 800 words of print or in a blog post — but you can start a conversation, advance or rebut an argument, and give people who share your interest something to talk about.

And that kind of provocation, that spur to further discourse, is all criticism has ever been. It is not a profession and does not stand or fall with any particular business model. Criticism is a habit of mind, a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them. As such, it is always apt to be misunderstood, undervalued and at odds with itself. Artists will complain, fans will tune out, but the arguments will never end.

So I’ve come full circle. The future of criticism is the same as it ever was. Miserable, and full of possibility. The world is always falling down. The news is always very sad. The time is always late.

But the fruit is always ripe.

— A. O. Scott, nytimes.com

. . . created by God to live, rather than live through things, that heroic version of spending the time assigned you.

— Margriet de Moor

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,
More fortunate, alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.

— Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”