Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead — as if innocence had ever been — and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled…

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.