Thursday, March 02, 2006
Survival
C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 113:
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What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive. Higher organisms are often conquered by lower ones. Arts as well as men are subject to accident and violent death. The philosophy of history outlined by Keats' Oceanus is not true. We ask too often why cultures perish and too seldom why they survive; as though their conservation were the normal and obvious fact and their death the abnormality for which special causes must be found. It is not so. An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men's fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery.See the speech by Oceanus in John Keats, Hyperion, Book II, lines 173-243, especially 228-229:
'Tis the eternal law / That first in beauty should be first in might.
