quotes, part 2
Jan. 16th, 2006 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonI just ran across in my notes this quote from a book I read years ago, and it has such texture, as well as interesting things to say about wonder...
------
The Magian World View
"The outlook of the Middle Ages... It was a sense of the unfathomable wonder of the invisible world that existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty and day to day demands of the tangible world. It was a readiness to see demons where nowadays we see neuroses, and to see the hand of a guardian angel in what we are apt to shrug off ungratefully as a stroke of luck. It was religion, but a religion with a thousand gods, none of them all powerful and most of them ambiguous in their attitude toward man. It was poetry and wonder which might reveal themselves in the dunghill, and it was an understanding of the dunghill that lurks in poetry and wonder. It was a sense of living in what Spengle called a quivering cavern-light which is always in danger of being swallowed up in the surrounding impenetrable darkness.
We have paid a terrible price for our education, such as it is. The Magian World View, in so far as it exists, has taken flight into science, and only the great scientists have it or understand where it leads; the lesser ones are merely clock-makers of a larger growth, just as so many of our humanist scholars are just cud-chewers or system grinders. We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and the fear and dread and splendour and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, because it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshipped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless.
Everything has its astonishing, wondrous aspect, if you bring a mind to it that is really your own- a mind that hasn't been smeared and blurred with half understood mush from schools, or the daily papers, or any other ragbag or reach-me-down notions. I try not to judge people, though when I meet an enemy and he's within arms length, I am not above giving him a smart clout, just to larn him...But I don't monkey with what I think of as the Great Justice-...
It doesn't look poetic in action; it's rough and tough and deeply satisfying. And I don't administer it. Something else-something I don't understand, but feel and serve and rear- does that. It's sometimes horrible to watch...but part of the glory and terror of our life, is that somehow, at sometime, we get all that's coming to us. Everybody gets their lumps and their bouquets and it goes on for quite a while after death."
--from World of Wonders by Robertson Davies.
------
The Magian World View
"The outlook of the Middle Ages... It was a sense of the unfathomable wonder of the invisible world that existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty and day to day demands of the tangible world. It was a readiness to see demons where nowadays we see neuroses, and to see the hand of a guardian angel in what we are apt to shrug off ungratefully as a stroke of luck. It was religion, but a religion with a thousand gods, none of them all powerful and most of them ambiguous in their attitude toward man. It was poetry and wonder which might reveal themselves in the dunghill, and it was an understanding of the dunghill that lurks in poetry and wonder. It was a sense of living in what Spengle called a quivering cavern-light which is always in danger of being swallowed up in the surrounding impenetrable darkness.
We have paid a terrible price for our education, such as it is. The Magian World View, in so far as it exists, has taken flight into science, and only the great scientists have it or understand where it leads; the lesser ones are merely clock-makers of a larger growth, just as so many of our humanist scholars are just cud-chewers or system grinders. We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and the fear and dread and splendour and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, because it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshipped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless.
Everything has its astonishing, wondrous aspect, if you bring a mind to it that is really your own- a mind that hasn't been smeared and blurred with half understood mush from schools, or the daily papers, or any other ragbag or reach-me-down notions. I try not to judge people, though when I meet an enemy and he's within arms length, I am not above giving him a smart clout, just to larn him...But I don't monkey with what I think of as the Great Justice-...
It doesn't look poetic in action; it's rough and tough and deeply satisfying. And I don't administer it. Something else-something I don't understand, but feel and serve and rear- does that. It's sometimes horrible to watch...but part of the glory and terror of our life, is that somehow, at sometime, we get all that's coming to us. Everybody gets their lumps and their bouquets and it goes on for quite a while after death."
--from World of Wonders by Robertson Davies.
