In the case of the crossing
into the Twentieth
century, the records left by the pathfinders have received, for
better or worse, a smaller audience and fewer emulators than the
crossing from the Eighteenth. But also the Twentieth century has
been full of astounding distractions: Time here has birthed such
strange mutations that their genealogies remain difficult to
acknowledge. Partly also it is clear that much of culture, having
retreated to an Eighteenth century world-view, found it
inconceivable to jump across unlearned lessons toward new lessons
having those as their prerequisites. But most crucially,
the crossing into our time is of a
particularly
demanding nature, whose demands revolve specifically around
questioning coordinates of experience that have remained untampered
with for over two thousand years. The changes in music,
philosophy, mathematics, physics, and technology were the true
flowerings of long traditions of inquiry and exploration, but for
the wider culture the impression they made was more of lights being
turned off than on. The wonder of the intellectual developments at
the turn of this century was in uncovering
deeper and less evident foundations of things. But this new
ground, while promising new human beginnings in a truer reality,
became captive of the specialized languages shaped as sophisticated
probes into its unknown depths. The increasingly technical
orientation of those languages effected, at the heart of the
guiding mentality of culture, a Babel. The best that many have been
able to do in acknowledging their Estranged New World is to leave
much of what matters most up to 'experts' - who with their
terminologies meanwhile play blindmen and elephants.
A map of
the life of the mind would show a broad river between the banks of
the Twentieth century and the Nineteenth. Other centuries would
appear likewise divided by fluid boundary conditions, but of
dramatically different qualities. And Mind, it seems, adventures to
cross these currents not just in one place, nor all at once.
Stories of the early crossings we may recognize, from our own time,
as somehow more connected to each other than even to the common
origins from which they had often diametrically departed. Indeed,
the subsequent changes in culture, economics, and technology show
themselves in some way belonging to a land which required these
divergent paths for its compass. Nevertheless, since Shakespeare's
time it seems more and more challenging to articulate the fit
between such new found lands and how they come to be occupied. In
Europe, for example, as the Nineteenth century commenced, the wider
culture first embraced the Romantic movement but soon became
disillusioned by what it believed it had adopted. It thereupon fell
back toward a world-view held over from the preceding Enlightenment
- seemingly depositing in language, as a token both of its retreat
and of the identity it mistook, the lamentable misuse of the word
Idealism as synonymous with personal
values.
