1 by Hilma af Klint, painted during World War I. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. With an eye to our particular evolutionary inheritance, he adds:
They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons.
Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right.
#My story animated love full
Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. The war creates no absolutely new situation it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Īddressing an audience of frightened young scholars, unsure of what use their intellectual passion and creative labor have in a war-torn world, Lewis offers an elixir of perspective: Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) explores in a sermon he delivered in England at the peak of World War II, later included in his 1949 collection of addresses The Weight of Glory ( public library). Some of the greatest achievements of civilization, from mathematics to Nina Simone, have sprung up in the darkest of times. But the fact remains - and this has always been so - that even in the most tumultuous of circumstances, human beings have managed to divert their attention and its tendrils of intention away from destruction and toward creation. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known.Įven in the sliver of spacetime that is our present, perishable like every present of the past, an infinity of things are going on all at once, menacing and magnificent - a vast simultaneity of which we notice only a fleck, our attention narrowed by evolution and exploited by the news media. It bears repeating: Right now, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem.
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