IN T. S.Eliot's The Cocktail Party, a Broadway success eight seasons ago, a middle-aged character complains to an acquaintance: "I am obsessed by the thought of my own insignificance." His friend, a psychiatrist who understands him well, poetically replies:

Precisely. And I could make you feel

mportant,

And you would imagine it a marvellous cure;

And you would go on, doing such

amount of mischief

As lay within your power--until you

came to grief.

Half of the harm that is done in

this world

Is due to people who want to feel

important.

For a fine example of life imitating art, see the Cover Story in NATIONAL AFFAIRS, What Orval Hath Wrought.

NO cranny of public or private life is safe from the curiosity of the U.S. press--except the U.S. press. Publishers treat other publishers as fellow club members whose foibles--and achievements--may be whispered about in a corner of the library but are not to be bruited about in public print. From its window seat in the clubhouse, TIME sees newspapers and newsmen, as well as other magazines, as legitimate, significant and often fascinating subjects for discussion and criticism. Because no other general U.S. publication talks so regularly and so candidly about the press in action, TIME's Press section is must reading for most newsmen, and an intriguing source of information for the millions who read newspapers and magazines. For a story that will be discussed in city rooms and ignored in newspapers from coast to coast, see PRESS, New Tonic for the Trib.

LIKE all French Finance Ministers, Felix Gaillard occupies quarters in the Palace of the Louvre, and en route to his private dining salon passes through the state apartment of Napoleon III with its massive chandeliers, velvet drapery and columns, caryatids and cherubs encrusted with gold leaf. "Ugly, isn't it?" remarked Gaillard cheerfully to a TIME reporter. "All the gold I own is on these walls." This week Felix Gaillard arrives in the U.S. See FOREIGN NEWS, France's Daring Young Man.

THE news in science, week after week, falls into a wondrous variety of categories--from astronomy (the sweep of galaxies) to biology (the strange way of animals) to archaeology (the digging into man's past). Occasionally, as it does this week, the fascinating news in science comes under agriculture. Now quarantined in the Carolinas is a pesky parasite called Striga asiatica, or witchweed, that could cause more trouble than Asian flu and ruin crops from Virginia to Texas. See SCIENCE, Little Red Flower.

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