Fin De Siecle Quotes

At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents...

Today is Thursday, Vallejo is dying, but come, girl, get your raincoat, let's look for life in some cafe behind tear-streaked windows, perhaps the fin de siecle isn't really finished, maybe there's a piano playing it somewhere

But do you imagine there’s a certain type of person in the world who conforms to the idea of a ‘bad person'? You’ll never find someone who fits that mold neatly, you know. On the whole, all people are good, or at least they’re normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch. That’s why you have to be careful.

Life's a jumble of farce and melodrama, the chaotic scribbling of a third-rate penny-a-liner. We mock it to keep from going mad--or at least to display our good taste.

Does technology illuminate reason, or is it the other way around?

Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Basil,' cried Dorian, with a wild gesture of despair.

I used to ask myself, ‘Sergei, would you rather spend your money on drink or women?’ and thanks to the club, I spend it on both and am called a patron of the arts.

When I was a student, there wasn't a single thing we did that was unrelated to others. It was all for the Emperor, or parents, or the country, or society—everything was other-centered, which means that all educated men were hypocrites. When society changed, this hypocrisy ceased to work, and as a result, self-centeredness was gradually imported into thought and action, and egoism became enormously over-developed. Instead of the old hypocrites, now all we've got are out-and-out rogues. Do you see what I mean by that?

The call for political freedom took place long ago. The call for freedom of speech is also a thing of the past. Freedom is not a word to be used exclusively for phenomena such as this which are so easily given outward manifestation. I believe that we young men of the new age have encountered the moment in time when we must call for that great freedom, the freedom of the mind.

The fascinated loathing which he (Jean Lorrain) cultivated for the decadence of fin de siecle Paris has a good deal of envy and ardent desire in it; in the words of Hubert Juin, he 'loved his epoch to the point of detestation.' (Introduction: "The Life And Career Of Jean Lorrain)

Eugenics has always been the escape valve of single payer socialized medicine. Havelock Ellis was writing about them as one and the same prior to the fin-de-siecle. Culling out of control population growth and the economic drain of the incurably sick has always been a part of socialized medicine.

We debate sometimes what is to be the future of this nation when we think that in a few years public affairs may be in the hands of the fin-de-siecle gilded youths we see about us during the Christmas holidays. Such foppery, such luxury, such insolence,was surely never practiced by the scented, overbearing patricians of the Palatine, even in Rome's most decadent epoch. In all the wild orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom.

They were like adolescents, desperately afraid of surrendering the very attitudes they were trying to kill off.

Dream is not so different from deed as many believe,” he wrote. “All activity of men begins as dream and later becomes dream once more.

You're ambitious, Achille. You've become the chief of detectives in record time, and there's talk you'll be the prefect someday, or even a cabinet minister. You'll have all the temptations of high office--honors, titles, bribes. As for your 'improvements,' see what people think of them when you try to change the world at their expense. You can make your own cross and climb your Calvary; in the end you'll die and the world will go on as messed up as it was before.

It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and thus conservative) form of social discourse. Reversal plays a double role in this novel (MONSIEUR VENUS), for it is not only a formal strategy bearing on citation, but itself a citation as well; one more cliché mobilized from the fin-de-siecle reserve.

A place without secrets hardly seems the proper venue for a spymaster... Orlovsky chose to hold court in the demimonde, a milieu in which he seemed to proclaim his presence with characteristic audacity. However, M. Orlovsky was one of those camouflaged insects that blends into its surroundings and thus remains hidden in plain sight.

which had drawn a world of rank and fashion still in stocks and beavers, 39 Sallet Square had been The Gallery and so it was still, with a history of wealth and prestige behind it unequalled in Europe. “Well?” The old woman was persistent. “How is he behaving?” Frances hesitated. “He and Phillida are staying with me at 38, you know,” she began cautiously. “It was Meyrick’s idea. He wanted Robert to be near.” Mrs. Ivory’s narrow lips curled. The mention of the house next door to The Gallery, where she had reigned throughout her career from its heyday in the seventies right up to the fin de siecle, always stirred her. “So Phillida’s at 38, is she?” she said. “Meyrick didn’t tell me that. You’re finding it difficult to live with her, I suppose? I don’t blame you. I could never abide a fool in the house even when it was a man. A silly woman is quite insufferable. What has she done now?” “No, it’s not Phillida,” said Frances slowly. “No, darling, I only wish it were.” She turned away and glanced out across the room to the barren trees far over the heath. There was a great deal more to worry

In the sphere of rights the irresistible trend is towards a situation where, if something can be taken for granted, all rights are otiose, whereas if a right must be demanded, it means that the battle is already lost; thus the very call for rights to water, air and space indicates that all these things are already on the way out. Similarly the evocation of a right to reply signals the absence of any dialogue, and so on. The rights of the individual lose their meaning as soon as the individual is no longer an alienated being, deprived of his own being, a stranger to himself, as has long been the case in societies of exploitation and scarcity. In his postmodern avatar, however, the individual is a self-referential and selfoperating unit. Under such circumstances the human-rights system becomes totally inadequate and illusory: the flexible, mobile individual of variable geometric form is no longer a subject with rights but has become, rather, a tactician and promoter of his own existence whose point of reference is not some agency of law but merely the efficiency of his own functioning or performance. Yet it is precisely now that the rights of man are acquiring a worldwide resonance. They constitute the only ideology that is currently available - which is as much as to say that human rights are the zero point of ideology, the sale outstanding balance of history. Human rights and ecology are the two teats of the consensus. The current world charter is that of the New Political Ecology. Ought we to view this apotheosis of human rights as the irresistible rise of stupidity, as a masterpiece which, though imperilled, is liable to light up the coming fin de siecle in the full glare of the consensus?

They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene.

Tears streamed down her wrinkled face. This world that she had longed to change for the better was as bad as the one into which she had been born. "An exercise in futility," she murmured.

I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

The century of airplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.

Si, comme l’écrit Dominique Viart, le roman de la famille creuse une « faille que le mot famille porte en lui », le mot couple porte en lui une autre faille, une césure, une coupe définitivement sans L.

What he said of Friedrich Hebbel’s poetry is true of his own, that it “penetrates us in such a way that the most secret … inner depths stir in us and the actually demonic, the natural in us, sounds in dark and intoxicating sympathetic vibration.”10 With all its danger, the instinctual element in man, “the natural in us,” provided the power whereby one could escape from the prison of aestheticism, from the paralysis of narcissistic sensibility. Engagement in life, Hofmannsthal felt, demands the capacity to resolve, to will. This capacity implies commitment to the irrational, in which alone resolution and will are grounded. Thus affirmation of the instinctual reopened for the aesthete the door to the life of action and society. How did Hofmannsthal see the great world which he now entered? Modern society and culture seemed to him, as to Schnitzler, hopelessly pluralistic, lacking in cohesion or direction. “… [T]he nature of our epoch,” he wrote in 1905, “is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the moving, the slipping, the sliding], and is aware that what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende”11 This new perception of reality undermined the very efficacy of reason for Hofmannsthal. “Everything fell into parts, the parts again into more parts,” says one of his characters, “and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts any more.”12 Hofmannsthal saw it as the trial of the noblest natures to take into themselves “a wholly irrational mass of the non-homogeneous,

which can become their enemy, their torture.”13 For the poet, this trial was actually the call to his proper function in the modern world: to knit together the disparate elements of the time, to build “the world of relations [Bezüge]” among them. The poet would do his unifying work not by imposing law, but by revealing the hidden forms in which the parts of life are bound to each other. Thus the poet, rather like the historian, accepts the multiplicity of things in their uniqueness and reveals the unity in their dynamic interrelationship. He brings the discordant into harmony through form.

Sitte called himself a “lawyer for the artistic side,” aiming at “a modus vivendi” with the modern system of city building.41 This self-definition is important, revealing as it does Sitte’s deeply held assumption that “artistic” and “modern” were somehow antithetical terms. The “modern” to him meant the technical and rational aspects of city building, the primacy of what he repeatedly referred to as “traffic, hygiene, etc.” The emotionally effective (wirkungsvoll) and picturesque (malerisch) on the one hand, and the efficient and practical on the other, were by nature contradictory and opposed, and their opposition would increase as modern life became ever more governed by material considerations.42 The lust for profit, dictating the achievement of maximum density, governed land use and street plan. Economic aims expressed themselves in the ruthless geometrical systems of city layout—rectilinear, radial, and triangular. “Modern systems!” Sitte complained, “Yes! To conceive everything systematically, and never to deviate a hair’s breadth from the formula once it’s established, until all genius is tortured to death, all joyful sense of life suffocated, that is the mark of our time.”43

Where he makes a jest, a problem lies concealed.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, published two years before his jocular announcement, Freud had laid down his first principle of understanding the problems of dreams: “A dream is the fulfillment of a wish.

what was a modern style? To tear off the screens of history was one thing; to define modern man and to celebrate his nature in building was another. In the quest for a visual language suited to his age, Wagner found allies in a younger generation of Viennese artists and intellectuals who were pioneers in forming twentieth-century higher culture. In 1897 a group of them banded together to form the Secession, an association that would break the manacles of tradition and open Austria to European innovations in the plastic arts—and especially to art nouveau. The motto of the Secession could only have struck the strongest response in Wagner: “To the Age Its Art, to Art Its Freedom.” So, too, Ver Sacrum (Holy Spring), the name chosen for the Secession’s periodical, expressed the movement’s solemn commitment to regenerate art in Austria and Austria through art. One of Wagner’s most gifted younger associates, Josef Olbrich, designed the Secession’s pioneering modern building, using the form of a modernized temple to suggest the function of art as a surrogate religion for Vienna’s secular intellectual élite (Figure 39).

History,” Burckhardt once observed, “is what one age finds worthy of note in another.

What alone mattered was that the boy cultivate his faculties for the optimum enjoyment of refined leisure. The gifted son was consequently reared in a virtual hothouse for the development of aesthetic talent.* Small wonder that the adolescent Hofmannsthal became a young Narcissus, “early ripened and tender and sad.”8 Quickly absorbing the fashionable poetic and plastic culture of all Europe, his language glowed darkly with purple and gold, shimmered with world-weary mother-of-pearl.

Where law ignores instinct, instinct rebels and subverts order.

It is too late for a politics based on law alone, too soon for a politics of grace which sublimates instinct.

Hofmannsthal once observed that the activity of modern poets “stands under the decree of necessity, as though they were all building on a pyramid, the monstrous residence of a dead king or an unborn god.

Wir können warten. Wissen macht frei.” (We can wait. Knowledge liberates.) In these confident words the stalwart Ritter von Schmerling expressed the rationalistic expectations of the political process at the beginning of the liberal era in 1861.29 At the end of that era, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, scion of a cultivated middle-class family, offered a different formula for political success: “Politics is magic. He who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow.

Now they must be directed toward an inner, psychological reality. “No one thought of looking for the promised land where it is, and yet it lies so nearby. There it is: inside ourselves!… The promised land is wherever we carry it!

Confusion over the identity of things is thus a function of our very attempts to substantiate them, to fix them in memory. This indifference of memory, this indifference to history, is proportional to our efforts to achieve historical objectivity. One day we shall be asking ourselves whether Heidegger himself ever existed. The paradox of Robert Faurisson's thesis may seem repugnant - and indeed, it is repugnant in its historical claim that the gas chambers never existed - but at the same time it is a perfect reflection of a whole culture: here is the dead end of a fin de siecle so mesmerized by the horror of the century's origins that forgetting is an impossibility for it, and the only way out is denial. So proof is useless, since there is no longer any historical discourse in which to frame the case for the prosecution, but punishment too is in any case an impossibility. Auschwitz and the final solution simply cannot be expiated. Punishment and crime have no common measure here, and the unrealistic character of the punishment ensures the unreality of the facts. What we are currently experiencing is something else entirely. What is actually occurring ­collectively, confusedly, via all the trials and debates - is a transition from the historical stage to a mythical stage: the mythic - and media-led - reconstruction of all these events. And in a sense this mythic conversion is the only possible way, not to exculpate us morally, but to absolve us in phantasy from the guilt of this primal crime. But in order for this to be achieved, in order for even a crime to become a myth, the historical reality must first be eradicated.

This identifies a central contradiction in the novel. The middle classes represent modernity, money, ambition and a sense of justice. However such a nebulous notion of a social and economic vision is unsustainable once individuals are isolated. Harker, alone in Castle Dracula, is a very different figure than that at the end of the novel as he plays his designated role in the destruction of the Count. The problem with vampirism is that it is too seductive and the fact that Harker is susceptible to its charms suggests *his* latent degeneracy. The Count will just not stay 'Othered'. Chapter 1 discussed this in relation to how Harker is made a 'man' by his encounter with Dracula. The paradox being that the Count represents a model of heroic manliness that he needs to emulate; in this way 'disease' is brought back into 'civilisation' in a way which is familiar from contemporary accounts of degeneration and London. -Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-De-Siecle