Belle Barth Quotes

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

Contrast the upbeat contemporary perspective with that of theologian Karl Barth, who was a prominent figure in the church’s resistance to Nazism (one of the offspring of Nietzsche’s philosophy). Each Sunday, notes Barth, the church bell is rung to announce to the village that God’s word is to be proclaimed: “And if none of these things help, will not the crosses in the churchyard which quietly look in through the windows tell you unambiguously what is relevant here and what is not?”5 The sanctuary did not see the world through rose-colored windows but through clear glass that brought reality home. But that was when we had graveyards on church grounds. Today, we have conveniently removed death, and with it the communion of the saints, and relegated it to nondescript secular cemeteries with euphemistic names like “Forest Lawn.” The average person today is about as likely to come in contact with the dead and dying as with the sources of daily bread. We now have supermarkets for everything, with cheerful music soothing any inconvenient questions, doubts, or fears about how we are dealing with life and death. Even our churches can exhibit this tendency.

Obliger a penser tout seul, voila une definition possible de la culture classique. Une civilisation n'est belle que dans la mesure ou il y a une circulation naturelle entre les oeuvres de ses grands hommes et la vie intime de ses individus et de ses foyers.