Illusion Of The Epoch Quotes

THE DEVIL. As far as I went, yes. But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation, every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion....

There are innumerable civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many cultural epochs.    If

If the European grows accustomed not to rule, a generation and a half will be sufficient to bring the old continent, and the whole world along with it, into mortal inertia, intellectual sterility, universal barbarism. It is only the illusion of rule, and the discipline of responsibility which it entails, that can keep Western minds in tension. Science, art, technique, and all the rest live on the tonic atmosphere created by the consciousness of authority. If this is lacking, the European will gradually become degraded. Minds will no longer have the radical faith in themselves which impels them, energetic, daring, tenacious, towards the capture of great new ideas in every order of life. The European will inevitably become a day-to-day man. Incapable of creative, specialized effort, he will always be falling back on yesterday, on custom, on routine. He will turn into a commonplace, conventional, empty creature, like the Greeks of the decadence and those of the Byzantine epoch.

When people don’t travel to places different from those they inhabit in their routines they become habituated to the actualities of their worlds. They see things as one, knowing what they see is true. Nothing in their experience has the possibility of exposing the frailty of their illusions, of self, of world, of morality and each other.

Just as Charles Darwin explains that species are not immutable, and that they possess a past, a present and a future, changing and evolving, so Marx and Engels explain that a given social system is not something eternally fixed. That is the illusion of every epoch. Every social system believes that it represents the only possible form of existence for human beings, that its institutions, its religion, its morality are the last word that can be spoken. That is what the cannibals, the Egyptian priests, Marie Antoinette and Tsar Nicolas all fervently believed. And that is what the bourgeoisie and its apologists today wish to demonstrate when they assure us, without the slightest basis, that the so-called system of "free enterprise" is the only possible system - just when it is beginning to sink.

Literary Fiction and Reality Towards the beginning of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil announces that 'no serious attempt will be made to... enter into competition with reality.' And yet it is an element in the situation he cannot ignore. How good it would be, he suggests, if one could find in life ' the simplicity inherent in narrative order. 'This is the simple order that consists in being able to say: "When that had happened, then this happened." What puts our mind at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation of life now represented in, as a mathematician would say, a unidimensional order.' We like the illusions of this sequence, its acceptable appearance of causality: 'it has the look of necessity.' But the look is illusory; Musil's hero Ulrich has 'lost this elementary narrative element' and so has Musil. The Man Without Qualities is multidimensional, fragmentary, without the possibility of a narrative end. Why could he not have his narrative order? Because 'everything has now become nonnarrative.' The illusion would be too gross and absurd. Musil belonged to the great epoch of experiment; after Joyce and Proust, though perhaps a long way after, he is the novelist of early modernism. And as you see he was prepared to spend most of his life struggling with the problems created by the divergence of comfortable story and the non-narrative contingencies of modern reality. Even in the earlier stories he concerned himself with this disagreeable but necessary dissociation; in his big novel he tries to create a new genre in which, by all manner of dazzling devices and metaphors and stratagems, fiction and reality can be brought together again. He fails; but the point is that he had to try, a sceptic to the point of mysticism and caught in a world in which, as one of his early characters notices, no curtain descends to conceal 'the bleak matter-of-factness of things.

14. We now come to another and most fruitful cause of the evils which at present afflict the Church, and which We so bitterly deplore; We mean indifferentism, or that fatal opinion everywhere diffused by the craft of the wicked, that men can by the profession of any faith obtain the eternal salvation of souls, provided their life conforms to justice and probity. But in a question so clear and evident it will undoubtedly be easy for Us to pluck up from amid the people confided to your care so pernicious an error. The apostle warns us of it: "One God, one faith, one baptism." Let them tremble then who imagine that every creed leads by an easy path to the part of felicity; and reflect seriously on the testimony of our Saviour Himself, that those are against Christ who are not with Christ, and that they miserably scatter by the fact that they gather not with Him, and that consequently they will perish eternally without any doubt if they do not hold to the Catholic Faith, and preserve it entire and without alternations. Let them hear Saint Jerome himself, relating that, at the epoch when the Church was divided into three parties, he, faithful to what had been decided, incessantly repeated to all who endeavored to win him over: "Whoso is united to the chair of Peter is with me." In vain did they attempt to create an illusion by saying that he himself was regenerated in water; for Saint Augustine answers precisely: "The branch lopped off has the shape of the vine; but what avails the form if it have not the root?

Toward the end of the [Nineteenth] century, at the height of the liberal illusion, it was possible to indulge in the luxury of calling [De Maistre] the “prophet of the past,” of regarding him as a relic or an aberrant phenomenon. But we — in a somewhat more disabused epoch — know he is one of us precisely to the degree that he was a “monster”; it is in fact by the odious aspect of his “doctrines” that he lives for us, that he is our contemporary.

Himalayan Sonneteer Sonnet 2 Just like every family needs a pillar, Every generation needs a rock. All may sprinkle salt on each other's wounds, You for one, be the ointment to the epoch. Be the foundation stone to civilization, Be the walking measure of human character. You are the definition of sapience, You are the very definer. Let no law define your duty, Let no scripture determine goodness. Let no ancestor imprison your identity, Expand, explore and usher into sentience. You are the illusion, you are the truth. When evil hangs heavy, you gotta blow your fuse.

Wer einmal gesehen hat, wie schnell ein Staat zerbrechen kann, wie eine Mauer fallt, die für die Ewigkeit gebaut ist, hält Stabilität danach für eine Illusion.

We loved the wide-open west. Our explorations of the numinous Canadian landscape fed the songs, and our souls. We caught the west in the last of its wild state. Many of the songs I wrote in the seventies reflect our travels through the great expanse of the Canadian prairies, across the Rocky Mountains, to the moisture-rich West Coast. Space was everywhere, and there is space in the songs. Everything wasn’t a tourist trap yet, clear-cutting was not so evident, and agribusiness hadn’t completely killed off the family farm. In the first couple of years that Kitty, Aroo, and I travelled westward from Ontario, we were practically the only road campers out there. Seldom did we run across anyone else travelling the way we were. The prairies were full of abandoned old farmhouses—no families to be seen—harbingers of the reversion to feudal agricultural economics. All around the land still looked wild. Our journeys offered at least the illusion of freedom, as well as a deep sense of the land as Divine creation. Soon, though, we were seeing the spaces fill up with scabrous industrial sites, hotels, housing developments, shopping opportunities. We’d watch like gawkers at a train wreck as the land was eaten up before our eyes by inevitable human expansion and greed. There were ever more rules about where you could park your camper. It was the tail end of an epoch when the land was open and it, and we, could breathe freely. That will never come again.

MOHAMMED’S BIOGRAPHER He was an evangelical pastor, but not for long. Religious orthodoxy was not for him. An open-minded man, a passionate polemicist, he traded the church for the university. He studied at Princeton, taught in New York. He was a professor of Oriental languages and author of the first biography of Mohammed published in the United States. He wrote that Mohammed was an extraordinary man, a visionary blessed with irresistible magnetism, and also an impostor, a charlatan, a purveyor of illusions. But he thought no better of Christianity, which he considered “disastrous” in the epoch when Islam was founded. That was his first book. Later on, he wrote others. In the field of Middle Eastern affairs, few academics could compare. He lived indoors surrounded by towers of strange books. When he wasn’t writing, he read. He died in New York in 1859. His