Alpha minus query

VOLUME I: THE MODERN MOVEMENT
VOLUME TWO: THE TWO NATURES
with a foreword by William Boyd

As a formula for failure, the first line of Cyril Connolly’s once famous ‘word cycle’, The Unquiet Grave, is unsurpassable:

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Engrave that over the lintel of any writer’s study and you’ll have put an end to the whole business, since what else is this craft of words but a fool’s attempt to trap a flickering intuition of the world between a capital letter and a full stop? No doubt lofty purposes can sometimes, very few times, be achieved: one thinks of Milton wanting ‘to be milked’ of a worthy subject, or Dante convinced that ‘Minerva blows the sails and Apollo leads me’. But in most cases a fickle bunch of readers distributes the prizes and doesn’t give a hoot for either the writer’s good intentions or literature’s true function.