Fragments
Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’ (1919):
It was not enough for our generation to learn from its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perish by accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and common sense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally belied.
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Osip Mandelstam, ‘The Nineteenth Century’ (1922):
The essence of the cognitive activity of the nineteenth century is projection. The century that has passed did not like to speak of itself in the first person but loved to project itself on the screen of strange epochs, and its life consisted of that, that was its movement. With its dreamless thought, as with an immense mad projector, it cast histories out over the dark sky; with gigantic illuminated tentacles it rummaged in the wastes of time; it plucked out of the darkness this or that chunk, burned it up with the blinding glitter of its historical laws, and indifferently allowed it once again to drop into nothingness as if nothing had happened.
It was not merely a single projector that fumbled along this terrible sky: all the sciences were turned into their own abstract and monstrous methodologies (with the exception of mathematics). The triumph of naked method over knowledge was essentially complete and exclusive… And all the sciences together fumbled along the starless sky (and this century’s sky was amazingly starless) with their methodological tentacles, meeting no opposition in that soft, abstract emptiness.
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Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and poverty’ (1933):
No, this much is clear: experience’s stock has fallen and did so for a generation that underwent, from 1914 to 1918, one of the most horrific experiences in world history. Perhaps this is not as surprising as it seems. Was the observation not made at the time that people returned mute from the battlefield? They did not come back richer in experiences they could impart, but poorer. What flowed into the flood of books about the war that appeared ten years later was anything but experience, which streams from lips to ears. No, this was not surprising at all. For experiences have never been refuted more thoroughly than strategic ones were by trench warfare, economic ones by inflation, physical ones by hunger, ethical ones by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars found itself under the open sky in a landscape in which only the clouds were unchanged and where, in the midst of it all, in a force field crossed by devastating currents and explosions, stood the tiny, fragile human body.
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Stefan Zweig, Diary (Autumn 1939):
Always the same default in mankind, a thorough lack of imagination!
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René Char, Hypnos (1946):
227: Man is capable of doing what he is incapable of imagining. His mind furrows the galaxy of the absurd.