An occasional spasm of lucidity is all we may ever expect. Enlightened individuals crop up in the most unlikely places and epochs; enlightened groups of them are as common as a flock of white blackbirds. The world has grown not only older since Pericles; it has grown stupider.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, May 05, 2014
Older and Stupider
Norman Douglas (1868-1952), How About Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), p. 5: