It's better to grow up in a land where poets & writers are pretty much low-class, invisible, neglected, ignored.

Why so, O Henry?

Because that first taste of writing something original, something your own... that indelible experience of inner freedom... maybe it's powerful to the extent that it contrasts with the dullness & repression of the milieu out of which it has emerged.

& when writing is celebrated & glorified & adulated & popularized & becomes hip & funded & organized & careerified... maybe hordes of so-called writers emerge who don't really recognize that moment of freedom - or value it much... writing becomes a sort of social game, reflecting complacency rather than that original, primordial thirst...

(thoughts of an old-timer from the mysterious 1950s)