That the word “culture” is related to the Latin word for “cultivation,” for “tending”—like a gardener cultivates soil by supplying it with necessary nutrients, amending it with natural fertilizers, or removing weeds—signifies that culture does not merely indicate high-level products or content which emerge from any given society, but is in fact the very living substratum from which these products emerge.
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Simone Weil on Force and Deformity
The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.
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Beuechner on Nature, Time, and Anachronism
But the point, I suppose, is that, given the people we are and the nature of our times, we can't do or be anything other than what we are, at least not anything much. It's as if something in the very nature of chronos almost physically prevents our occasional little stabs at anachronism.
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McCarthy on the Loss of Godspoke Men
On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.
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Christopher Dawson on Dark Times
In these dark times there must be many who feel tempted to despair when they see the ruin of the hopes of peace and progress that inspired the Liberal idealism of the last century, and the perversion of the great achievements of human knowledge and power to serve the devilish forces of destruction. Never, perhaps, has a civilization suffered such a total subversion of its own standards and values while its material power and wealth remained almost intact, and in many respects greater than ever.