Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anestheti...c: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosm...ic triumph. Whereas the former--the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers--prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a ...sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescents are the bearers of cultural renewal, those cycles of generation and regeneration that link our limited individual dest...inies with the destiny of the species.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony... and has no ear for its whispering lacks eo ipso what might be called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The republic, as I at least understand it, means association, of which liberty is only an element, a necessary antecedent. It mean...s association, a new philosophy of life, a divine Ideal that shall move the world, the only means of regeneration vouchsafed to the human race.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks no...thing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice--is often the means of their regeneration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It'...s the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant.... We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »