There are still some natural forces that everybody understands. Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.

Fear of carbs, of gluten, of everything - we've distanced ourselves from the beauty of food, the art of it. It makes me sad when people say, 'Oh, I don't eat gluten. I don't eat cheese. I don't eat this. So I eat cardboard.'

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.