Monday, June 8, 2015

Words For The Present, From The Past

Archibald Leish was an American Poet, a Librarian of Congress and a multiple Pulitzer Prize winner.  Here is a somber piece he wrote in The Saturday Review on October 14, 1967 (My first year in College), that I thought you might be interested in reading:

"There is, in truth, a terror in the world and the Arts have heard as they always do. Under the hum of the miraculous machines, and the ceaseless publications of the brilliant physicists, a silence waits and listens and is heard. It is the silence of apprehension. We do not trust our time, and the reason we do not trust our time is because it is we who have made the time, and we do not trust ourselves. We have played the heroes part, mastered the monsters, accomplished the labors, and have become gods, and we do not trust ourselves as gods because deep inside we know what we really are. In the old days when the gods were someone else the knowledge of what we were did not frighten us. There were Furies to pursue the Hitlers and Athenas to restore the Truth. But now that we are gods ourselves, we bare the knowledge for ourselves. Like that old Greek hero who learned when all the labors had been accomplished, that it was he himself who had killed his sons."
— Archibald MacLeish

Sobering...seems like the chickens have come home to roost.

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