about quality

I imagine an aristocracy of editors. 

Literary editors of a refined, almost mandarin sensibility. Editors who look back to the great writers and poets as examples of, well, greatness. Editors who when presented with stuff written these days would experience an intense aversion. Palpable symptoms of shock and horror would nearly hospitalize them. 

This aristocracy of editors is comprised of literary aesthetes, who will reject nearly everything, certainly my own work. Yet because they exist in imagination, they perform a salutary service: they place upon the aspiring creative mind an extreme self-critical awareness; upon the blank page, a memorial texture of literature's best ghosts; upon the trembling pen an obligation to leak out the least amount of irksome ink.