A couple of unrelated[?] and obscure passages of text by two (with a brief mention of a third) diametrically opposed writers which I somehow feel the need to connect:
Out of the wound we pluck
The shrapnel. The thorns we squeeze
Out of the hand. Even poison forth we suck,
And after pain we have ease.
But images that grow
Within the soul have life
Like cancer and, often cut, live on below
The deepest of the knife,
Waiting their time to shoot
At some defenceless hour
Their poison, unimpaired, at the hearts root,...... [C S Lewis, Relapse]
We live in an age of the convenience of the moment, including or especially financial, when no sacrifice for the sake of aesthetics is deemed to be worth making. We do not build sub specie aeternitatis because we do not believe in eternity of any kind, spiritual, artistic, or cultural. Thus the ugliness of modern Europe is not the same as the ugliness of the past, a manifestation of poverty. It is the ugliness of a society in which people believe in nothing but their standard of living, as measured by their personal convenience and consumption. It is the ugliness of civilizational exhaustion.Dr. Francis Schaeffer called it ‘personal peace and prosperity’, rather than ‘personal convenience and consumption’, though of course the good Dr. was a Christian and the writer Theodore Dalrymple, is a self-confessed atheist. Make of the difference what you will, the similarities however are telling as is some connection between the first and the last excerpts, I think?
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