i often do not agree with macneice; but it doesn't detract from my enjoyment of his prose, as here:

modern thought has got to the bottom of everything. we are singularly blessed; now we know what the world is like -- it is a vast pressure of water on top of us and a blankness of mud below us and the danger of drowning and the nearness of octopuses. modern thought has gone to the heart of the matter and has found not a heart of gold nor a heart of passion nor a heart even of candy but a clammy mass of globular unpleasantess, a butcher's residue. modern thought has explained everything excellently, has, in fact, unravelled everything; where there was, when we left the room, a completed woollen garment, we find when we return a tangle of separate strands, and instead of being angry we say what a clever kitten it is thus to reassert the fundamental elements of things and refute the fictitious simplicity of an artificial complexity.

from the selected prose of louis macneice.
(i'm never going to give this back to widener, am i?)