Sublime

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is. There is “neither art nor philosophy,” Fukuyama says. All that’s left is the “perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”

Pocock argues that while humanists, such as Machiavelli, believed that the citizen fulfilled himself through civic virtue rather than through ecclesiastical sacraments, they were still unable to develop a theory of history, or what Pocock calls historicism.

I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.

Pocock argues that right through the nineteenth century this Old World preoccupation with virtue as a sacred, rational and timeless value persisted in America, and the vision of history as dynamic and creative in its “linear capacity to bring about incessant qualitative transformations of human life” struggled to emerge in pure form.

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Bulteau l’aiguille vers de nouveaux auteurs, lui prête Le Désir et la Poursuite du tout, l’histoire d’une passion débauchée idéalisée par l’écrivain anglais