'Some of the old writers write about Knowledge with passion, as lovers speak of a mistress. She is "divine"; to "woo" her is rapture; to win her is joy past words. That is the tone, and to the common run of our middle-class young to-day it must seem to be mere tall talking or gush. For they are out of it all; it belongs to a lost world which they are not even able to miss, they are so far from having entered it. Checked in their mental growth by dead mechanical teaching, bound over for life to remain overgrown dunces, tied down to second-rateness by many impressionable years of intimacy with mean valuations, what are the poor things to do? Some of them are brought, perhaps, by the more virile kinds of sport as near as they are likely ever to come to the thrill of the high adventures of the human spirit. Some others put up with such simulacra as dissipation affords of the most puissant emotions attainable by men. Some just eddy about in the eddying dust all their days, blown round and round by adventitious gusts of sentimentalism or of fashion.'
from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter V, Part VI)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment