Meaning & meaninglessness

I don't know where to start.

With Charles Taylor being convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 50 years in jail or the report that Barack Obama personally decides which terrorist target to assassinate--formulating a hands-on 'kill list' in the manner of Caligula or a movie by Quentin Tartantino--while reading Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

If literature is 'news that stays news' as Ezra Pound put it, what am I to  make of what's happening in the world I live in at the moment? And what responsibility do I have?

I used to think writing a poem, or trying to write a poem, was enough to prove my humanity.

And that reading good books would make me a better person.

I see that I was wrong, but I don't know what else to do. And it's too late to change.

Somewhere in my memory bank is something Leo Tolstoy wrote on the meaninglessness of art. He wrote it near the end of his life. It was a withering piece of prose, written by a deeply troubled man. I'm going to look through my papers for it right now.