First of all, the statement has a predictive quality, in that the ‘conceivable’ situation that Merton imagines for the artist is distinguished from the actual situation that he implies the artist inhabits now. (That actual situation being the one we know and are familiar with, the one in which the artist is not ‘integrated’ with society, but is, by necessity, a rebel or contrarian or outsider. The truth of which seems to me so apparent that I feel no need to say more about it, at least not at this moment.)