Tuesday, August 17, 2021
Escapism
Leo Spitzer, review of Ernst Robert
Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948), in American Journal of Philology 70.4 (1949) 425-431 (at 428):
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And is not the insight into such basic conservatism of man an antidote against the feeling of helplessness engendered by the vista of chaotic dismemberment and of the crumbling of tradition that the world of today offers us? Before the forces of barbarism that encircle us, Curtius has found an escape by immersing himself in the necropolis of a past that was alive as late as the eighteenth century (this is for Curtius the dividing line between his Middle Ages and modernity).
