Vice-Regal Saint: "With emotion, to the man I used to be"
Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916)
THE PROUD TOWER built up through the great age of European civilization was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificence, extravagance and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in each other's company and conversation, more injustice and hypocrisy, more misery and want, more sentiment including false sentiment, less sufferance of mediocrity, more dignity in work, more delight in nature, more zest. The Old World had much that has since been lost, whatever may have been gained. Looking back on it from 1915, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian socialist poet, dedicated his pages, "With emotion, to the man I used to be."
— Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower, A Portrait of the World before the War
A Reading by Emile Verhaeren (1903) - Emile Verhaeren as seen from the back in his red jacket
Posts
1915.jpg){kind=small}
.gif)
.gif)
2 comments:
Damn television (as he posts on the Internet)!
The problem is one of balance and engagement, really ...
The Great War was the great avoidable tragedy of the twentieth century, in my opinion. It all but destroyed the old world of chivalry, honour, duty and beauty and pathed the way for the institutionalised ugliness of the modern world.
Television and the car have contributed to the loss of community and society, in my opinion. The internet has helped create some semblence of these things, albeit in a digital form. Splendid online communities like the Monarchist at least allow us like minded chaps to have some kind of a gentlemans club, even if we can not saunter over to the bar and order some bollinger.
Post a Comment