Two Accounts of Literary Decadence

"What is the mark of every literary decadence? That the life no longer resides in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the pages comes to life at the expense of the whole -- the whole is no longer a whole. This, however, is the style of every style of decadence: every time there is an anarchy of atoms."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Section 7

"I would define that baroque as the style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. In vain did Andrew Lang attempt in the 1880's to imitate Pope's Odyssey, it was already a parody and so defeated the parodist's attempt to exaggerate its tautness. "Baroco" was a term used for one of the syllogistic reasoning: the 18th century applied it to certain abuses in 17th century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders all its resources. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is inherently humorous."

Jorge Luis Borges, Preface to the 1954 edition of A Universal History of Inquity

"Metonymy as an Approach to the Real World" by William Bronk

                                          "Night Windows" by Edward Hopper

Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
--which what?--something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.

[From The World, The Worldless (1964)]

"Dogs and Other Philosophers"

As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young dog, still under the impression that since he was kept for running after sheep, the more he ran after them the better, had at the end of his meal off the dead lamb, which may have given him additional energy and spirits, collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid creatures through the hedge, across the upper field, and by main force of worrying had given them momentum enough to break down a portion of the rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.

[The dog] had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day -- another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

[From Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy]