Sublime

Late modernity is thus a condition of willful spiritual deafness. Enframed, racked, reduced to machinery, nature cannot speak unless spoken to, and then her answers must be only yes, no, or obedient silence. She cannot address us in her own voice. And we certainly cannot hear whatever voice might attempt to speak to us through her.

He could not stay in his chamber: the house contracted to a nut-shell around him; the walls smote his forehead; bare-headed he rushed from the place, and only in the infinite air, found scope for that boundless expansion of his life.

Still, a certain uneasiness spread among his students. Colleagues had begun to question his powers of reason. Admirers were saddened to see him stumble over facts, contradict himself, or…

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My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time

Ce qu'Érasme transmettait à la postérité, au milieu du désarroi de la guerre et des dissensions européennes, n'était que l'antique rêve, renouvelé des religions et des mythes, d'une future et inévitable humanisation de l'humanité, du triomphe de la lumineuse et équitable raison sur la vanité égoïste des passions : tracé pratiquement, pour la premiè