The child of today is born into a world whose traditions and standards are weakened, a world with inherited good habits, but no ruling philosophy of life. Through the last and still more the present century, the solid and impressive mansion which had been slowly built up through centuries of Christian belief, was steadily bombed.
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Auden on the Time After Christmas IV
He is the Truth. / Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety
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Auden on the Time After Christmas III
In the meantime / There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, / Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem / From insignificance.
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Auden on the Time After Christmas II
But, for the time being, here we all are, / Back in the moderate Aristotelian city / Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry / And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience, / And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
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Auden on the Time After Christmas I
Once again / As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed / To do more than entertain it as an agreeable / Possibility