A hundred years pass, and the West remains burdened by failed nineteenth-century ideas.
Yet it is in works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the full Voice of Reason is raised, and it remains in the cultural artifacts of the period that speak with equal and essential power in the modern perspective today.
The noise of the mob drowns it out, only to drown in the mediocrity it glorifies. Collective absurdity, for such it is, produces nothing, impedes progress, and silences free thought.
Its center remains the guillotine.
In precincts where modern genius yet thrives, it is understood that there are no problems for which solutions do not already exist. And all the arts, in concrete and abstract forms, are gathering force.
Yet it is in works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the full Voice of Reason is raised, and it remains in the cultural artifacts of the period that speak with equal and essential power in the modern perspective today.
The noise of the mob drowns it out, only to drown in the mediocrity it glorifies. Collective absurdity, for such it is, produces nothing, impedes progress, and silences free thought.
Its center remains the guillotine.
In precincts where modern genius yet thrives, it is understood that there are no problems for which solutions do not already exist. And all the arts, in concrete and abstract forms, are gathering force.
