Word: ailments
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...across the Channel at France and behold the world's two giants. These days one may behold the world's two giants from the moon or from the Bering Strait. But where, metaphorically, is our Dover Beach today? To Arnold, the divorce of intellect and feeling was the central ailment of his age. What is the central ailment...
...bewildered children of progress. The past year alone has produced enough scientific inventiveness to shake the spirit for a lifetime: the first baby from a frozen embryo, surrogate mothers, genetic transfers between animals, a record number of heart transplants, an animal heart transplant, another artificial heart. The central ailment of the age may simply be Arnold's writ larger...
Perhaps the central ailment of the age is a more personal matter, one that relates to the general advancement of knowledge, but that takes its effect silently in individuals. Jacques Ellul criticized the modern idea of work as compared with the ancient because, he said, work with machines puts people at a distance from their labors and thus evokes a feeling of absence instead of presence. Arnold, too, focused on the absence of things. It is a peculiarly desolating experience to look upon something new that one despises or has no feeling for and to recall with pleasure whatever...
...absence of a connection with nature could also be the central ailment of the times. Like the absence of beauty, this is an old complaint, but it seems to have grown more urgent in recent years, especially when an attachment to nature has been increasingly defined as the manipulation of nature. It is not that no one appreciates birds and trees any more; only that nature is rarely thought to offer any serious benefit to the mind. Questions of the environment are almost always reduced to issues of politics. Most people no longer make personal identifications with nature, yet people...
Both these ailments are related to a third--the absence of time--which, finally, may be the modern ailment that most needs curing. The Industrial Revolution may eventually give back much more than it took away, but it has never restored time. As anguished as were Arnold's thoughts in Dover, at least he had the time to deal with them; the world that had neither "certitude nor peace" was evidently not spinning so rapidly in the wrong direction that it allowed no moment for a corrective or contemplative voice. Arnold took hold of that moment; he felt that...