Word: arnolds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this does not ring true somehow. Unlike the industrial adventurers of the 19th century, most people today are very much aware of the problems, economic and spiritual, wrought by dead-eyed materialism. Arnold's criticism of his times would not be a bit shocking in ours; such criticism has been along on the march of progress for quite a while--even if it often sounds like short- order disapproval, whipped up automatically for predictable occasions. The computer is born, the computer is pilloried. An oil rig goes up, conservationists marshal their forces. Nineteenth century minds may have planted the seeds...
...divorce of intellect and feeling is the wrong place to look for a modern Dover Beach, however, it may yet have bearing on the right one. The world does not look as unremittingly bleak as Arnold painted it in those final lines of Dover Beach (How could it?), but it often can feel that bleak--minus joy, love, light, certitude, peace and help for pain. As yet, no industry has disinvented poverty or starvation. And one advanced invention threatens to turn the earth into a polar waste. Even if most people learn to adjust to machines or the new science...
...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 it displaced, or to see nothing where something was that once was cherished. Our affection attaches to that...
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...
...world less so than it was 134 years ago or a thousand, or the way it will be a thousand years hence, since its variety, beauty and novelty are always in the hands of people no different from those who strolled about the harbor or slept as Arnold scratched out his poem by the window? Everything depends on how one wishes to live one's life, which still requires the constancy Arnold promised his bride, and a good deal of courage besides. So we race wide-eyed into one more year, searching for the land of dreams that lies...