verbava все записи автора Northrop Frye – The Modern Century

In the year 1867 Thomas Hardy wrote a poem called '1967', in which he remarks that the best thing he can say about the year is the fact that he is not going to live to see it.

***

In proportion as the confidence in progress has declined, its relation to individual experience has become clearer. That is, progress is a social projection of the individual's sense of the passing of time. But the individual, as such, is not progressing to anything except his own death. Hence the collapse of belief in progress reinforces the sense of anxiety which is rooted in the consciousness of death.

***

The triumph of communication is the death of communication: where communication forms a total environment, there is nothing to be communicated.

***

Society can pursue equality to the point of forgetting about liberty.

***

As most great theorists of education, from Castiglione to Newman, have recognized, the form of liberal education is social, in the broadest sense, rather than simply intellectual. I should call this social form of liberal education, provisionally, a vision of society, or, more technically, a mythology.
In every age there is a structure of ideas, images, beliefs, assumptions, anxieties, and hopes which express the view of man's situation and destiny generally held at that time. I call this structure mythology and its units myths. A myth, in this sense, is an expression of man's concern about himself, about his place in the scheme of things, about his relation to society and God, about the ultimate origin and ultimate fate, either of himself or of the human species generally.

***

Naturally science has immense relevance to the myth of concern, especially when it manifests an ability to destroy or to improve human existence—in some areas, such as genetics, it is not always easy to distinguish the two things.

***

A closed mythology, like Christianity in the Middle Ages, requires the statement of theoretical belief from everyone, and imposes a discipline that will make practice consistent with it. Thus the closed mythology is a statement both of what is believed to be true and what is going to be made true by a certain course of action.

***

Traditionally, there are two elements in religion, considered as such apart from a definite faith. One is the primitive element of religio, the collection of duties, rituals, and observances which are binding on all members of a community. In this sense Marxism and the American way of life are religious. The other is the sense of a transcendence of the ordinary categories of human experience, a transcendence normally expressed by the words infinite and eternal.

free_readings