Le Petite Prince

38 notes

“
If we consider it all from a wholly unsympathetic standpoint, fashion offers us an astoundingly limited number of geometric possibilities, among which we alternate in the most passionate way, without ever totally disrupting the tradition. If we likewise include the fashions of thought, feeling, and action, about which practically the same can be said, then our entire history must appear to the sensitized eye as nothing but a corral, within the confines of which the human hoard stampedes senselessly back and forth. And yet how willingly we follow the leaders, who themselves merely charge ahead of us out of terror, and what joy grins back at us in the mirror when we connect with the fashionable norm, looking exactly like everyone else, even though everyone looks different than they did yesterday! Why do we need all this? Perhaps we fear, and rightfully so, that our character would scatter like a powder if did not pack it into a publicly approved container.
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Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, quoted by American Roulette and juxtaposed with Marcel Proust in a nice post titled The Perplexity of Character.

Musil’s wry suggestion that “…our entire history must appear to the sensitized eye as nothing but a corral, within the confines of which the human hoard stampedes senselessly back and forth” seems as much as anything the basis for his novel The Man Without Qualities, which features quite a lot of such stampeding. It also reminded me of a note in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, which A. lent to me and Abby recently:

In his book Art & Discontent: Theory at the Millennium, the art critic Thomas McEvilley develops the notion of the periodic recurrence of the postmodern, or rather the theory that modernist and postmodernist tendencies have actually been following one upon the other throughout history. In this context, for example, he uncovers a striking set of affinities between our own postmodernist ethos and that of the Alexandrian / Hellenistic age.

“Modernist” and “postmodernist” here mean temperaments, attitudes, cultural inclinations, not manifesto-laden creeds with specific content. Indeed, that’s the point: content -ideological, political, historical- is incidental, ephemeral, the stampeding of a species within a coral, a scattering powder outside of its container; form, the dynamics and relations and archetypes that map human experience, is largely unchanging. History is cyclical, not linear.

What we care about is content: dust filling vessels the form of which give shape to our existence. What we ignore is that shape, because without content it seems empty. But the profound exhaustion one sometimes experiences when reviewing some insipid iteration of culture -a new celebrity, a new serial killer, a new movement, a new war, the same as all the others- is a clue: everything is happening again and again and again, endlessly. Nothing is more illusory than novelty.

(via mills)