Tocqueville would be proud:
"In our most recent century, which has almost died away now, people worked more and more on the paysage intime—they wanted to tell the story of the nameless individuals. Someone finally seemed to notice that battles don’t only take place at Thermopylae or Hastings or Austerlitz, sometimes the battlefield is called Fear or Desire or Ingratitude; that not every discovery is of America; that not every invention has to arrive at gunpowder or the steam engine or the airship in order to be meaningful and, in a certain sense, fruitful. And so it has become the norm to present not true, authenticated heroes, but plausible, authentic-seeming heroes. To this end they have spent the last few decades ripping apart the heroes of the past and the usable contemporaries and putting together new, ever new possibilities from the unrecognizable pieces."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
(HT: Wystan)
Another thought: My blog is like my commonplace book, only interactive.
2 comments:
...The 19th century also was the first to shoot through the myth of war as an ennobling event. The Charterhouse of Parma and War and Peace, take your pick.
One could draw the same lesson from the History or the Iliad, but fewer people managed that.
i love common books, and always hoped my own blog would be like that. only it is too ephemeral and trend driven. alas.
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