One may of course try to ‘incarnate’ the idea of perfection by saying to oneself ‘I want to write like Shakespeare’ or ‘I want to paint like Piero’. But of course one knows that Shakespeare and Piero, though almost gods, are not gods, and that one has got to do the thing oneself alone and differently, and that beyond the details of craft and criticism there is only the magnetic non-representable idea of the good which remains not ‘empty’ so much as mysterious.
