Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don’t recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.
To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”
How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.
Mots clés music civilization immortality composer
When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate?
Harold Edmund StearnsMots clés equality civilization america individualism repression intellectualism distinction traditions lost-generation conventions second-rate standardisation
I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.
G. Willow WilsonMots clés civilization religion spirituality
Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.
Harold Edmund StearnsMots clés acceptance freedom adventure youth civilization america status-quo idealism possibility rebellion experimentation institutionalized emigration flexibility revolt lost-generation desertion looting
The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.
Malcolm CowleyMots clés art love philosophy civilization idealism paris escape greece social-life mexico americans san-francisco boats pure islands lost-generation greenwich-village scruples 1920s oppressive isles
Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.
Kazuo IshiguroMots clés fear roots war civilization religion misogyny destruction chaos belonging racism insecurity
There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.
James RobertsonMots clés silence patience civilization conversation pauses
والحضارة في خلقها الدائم لضرورات جديدة و قدرتها على فرض الحاجة على من لا حاجة له ، تعزز التبادل المادي بين الإنسان وبين الطبيعة وتغري الإنسان بالحياة البرَّانية على حساب حياته الجوانية. ((انتج لتربح واربح لتبدد)) هذه سمة في جبلة الحضارة ، أما الثقافة فتميل إلى التقليل من إحتيجات الإنسان أو الحد من درجة إشباعها ، وبهذه الطريقة توسع في آفاق الحرية الجوانية للإنسان.
Alija IzetbegovićMots clés civilization
No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
Robert McKeeMots clés knowledge learning civilization destruction plato citizens
Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?
Émile ZolaMots clés civilization class civilisation
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