Collected Passages
Note: these are highlights — passages that I found interesting enough to save, and which I'd enjoy talking about with someone. It should go without saying that saving something here does not imply I agree with its contents wholly or even in part. (I say it explicitly anyway just out of an abundance of caution.)
Poetry
Ozymandias (Shelley)
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
From Shelley’s Poetry and Prose
Norton, 1977
Text from the Poetry Foundation (website)
Love and Death (Byron)
1.
I watched thee when the foe was at our side,
Ready to strike at him—or thee and me,
Were safety hopeless—rather than divide
Aught with one loved save love and liberty.
2.
I watched thee on the breakers, when the rock
Received our prow, and all was storm and fear,
And bade thee cling to me through every shock;
This arm would be thy bark, or breast thy bier.
3.
I watched thee when the fever glazed thine eyes,
Yielding my couch and stretched me on the ground
When overworn with watching, ne’er to rise
From thence if thou an early grave hadst found.
4.
The earthquake came, and rocked the quivering wall,
And men and nature reeled as if with wine.
Whom did I seek around the tottering hall?
For thee. Whose safety first provide for? Thine.
5.
And when convulsive throes denied my breath
The faintest utterance to my fading thought,
To thee—to thee—e’en in the gasp of death
My spirit turned, oh! oftener than it ought.
6.
Thus much and more; and yet thou lov’st me not,
And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will.
Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot
To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.
From The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (1958)
Text from Poetry Foundation
Hymn of Apollo (Shelley)
I.
The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,
Curtained with star-inwoven tapestries,
From the broad moonlight of the sky,
Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes,--
Waken me when their Mother, the gray Dawn,
Tells them that dreams and that the moon is gone.
II.
Then I arise, and climbing Heaven's blue dome,
I walk over the mountains and the waves,
Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;
My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves
Are filled with my bright presence, and the air
Leaves the green Earth to my embraces bare.
III.
The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill
Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day;
All men who do or even imagine ill
Fly me, and from the glory of my ray
Good minds and open actions take new might,
Until diminished by the reign of Night.
IV.
I feed the clouds, the rainbows, and the flowers,
With their ethereal colors; the Moon's globe,
And the pure stars in their eternal bowers,
Are cinctured with my power as with a robe;
Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine,
Are portions of one power, which is mine.
V.
I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven;
Then with unwilling steps I wander down
Into the clouds of the Atlantic even;
For grief that I depart they weep and frown:
What look is more delightful than the smile
With which I soothe them from the western isle?
VI.
I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself, and knows it is divine;
All harmony of instrument or verse,
All prophecy, all medicine, is mine,
All light of art or nature; - to my song
Victory and praise in its own right belong.
From AllPoetry (website)
Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats)
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
From the Poetry Foundation
Song of Solomon (NRSV Translation)
My beloved is all radiant and ruddy, distinguished among ten thousand.
His head is the finest gold, his locks are wavy, black as a raven.
His eyers are like doves beside springs of water, bathed in milk, fitly set.
His cheeks are like beds of spices, yielding fragrance.
His lips are lilies, distilling liquid myrrh.
His arms are rounded gold, set with jewels.
His body is ivory work, encrusted with sapphires.
His legs are alabaster columns, set upon bases of gold. His appearance is like lebanon, choice as the cedars.
His speech is the most sweet, and he is altogether desirable.
This is my beloved and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.
(5:10-16)
Philosophy
Culture and Value (Wittgenstein)
One keeps forgetting to go right down to the foundations. One doesn’t put the question marks deep enough down. (62e)
The labour pains at the birth of new concepts. (62e)
Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (Wittgenstein)
It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and æsthetics are one.) (6.421)
There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. (6.522)
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?) (6.521)
The Gay Science (Nietzsche, Nauckhoff translation)
Nota bene: because of Nietzsche's style — aphoristic, self-contradictory, hyperbolic, literary — and the uniqueness of his ideas, passages from this book will be especially prone to misinterpretation. Nonetheless, I got a huge amount of value from this book, and this page is for my own sake primarily. (I have vastly more highlights than I could possibly put down here.) I ask that you're extremely careful in passing judgment on Nietzsche (or me lol) based simply on what's shown here.
This book might need more than one preface; and in the end there would still be room for doubting whether someone who has not experienced something similar could, by means of prefaces, be brought closer to the experiences of this book. It seems to be written in the language of the wind that brings a thaw: it contains high spirits, unrest, contradiction/ and April weather, so that one is constantly reminded of winter's nearness as well as of the triumph over winter that is coming, must come, perhaps has already come. ..Gratitude flows forth inces-santly, as if that which was most unexpected had just happened - the gratitude of a convalescent - for recovery was what was most unex-pected. 'Gay Science': this signifies the saturnalia' of a mind that has patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure - patiently, severely, coldly, without yielding, but also without hope - and is now all of a sudden attacked by hope, by hope for health, by the intoxication of recovery. Is it any wonder that in the process much that is unreasonable and foolish comes to light, much wanton tenderness, lavished even on problems that have a prickly hide, not made to be fondled and lured? This entire book is really nothing but an amusement after long privation and powerlessness, the jubilation of returning strength, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and a day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of reopened seas, of goals that are permitted and believed in again. (Preface to the second edition, I)
Annotation: Absurdly good preface, by far the best I have ever read. Besides the title and an epigraph-poem, this is the first text the reader gets in The Gay Science.
The explosive ones. — When one considers how the energy of young men needs to explode, one is not surprised to see them decide so unsubtly and so unselectively for this or that cause: what thrills them is the sight of the zeal surrounding a cause and, so to speak, the sight of the burning match - not the cause itself. The subtler seducers therefore know how to create in them the expectation of an explosion and to disregard justifying their cause: reasons are not the way to win over these powder kegs! (Aphorism 38)
Changed taste. — Change in common taste is more important than that in opinions; opinions along with proofs, refutations, and the whole intellectual masquerade are only symptoms of a changed taste and most certainly not what they are so often taken to be, its causes. How does common taste change? Through individuals - powerful, influential, and without any sense of shame - who announce and tyrannically enforce their hoc est ridiculum, hoc est absurdum, i.e. the judgement of their taste and disgust: thus they put many under pressure, which gradually turns into a habit among even more and finally becomes a need of everyone. (Aphorism 39)
The desire for suffering. — When I think of the desire to do something, how it continually tickles and goads the millions of young Europeans who cannot endure boredom and themselves, I realize that they must have a yearning to suffer something in order to make their suffering a likely reason for action, for deeds. Neediness is needed! Hence the clamour of the politicians; hence the many false, fictitious, exaggerated 'emergencies' of all kinds and the blind readiness to believe in them. This young world demands that not happiness, but unhappiness should approach or become visible from outside; and its imagination is already busy turning this unhappiness into a monster ahead of time so that afterwards it can fight a monster. (Aphorism 56)
Only as creators! — This has caused me the greatest trouble and still does always cause me the greatest trouble: to realize that what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the worth, the usual measure and weight of a thing - originally almost always something mistaken and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and quite foreign to their nature and even to their skin - has, through the belief in it and its growth from generation to generation, slowly grown onto and into the thing and has become its very body: what started as appearance in the end nearly always becomes essence and effectively acts as its essence! What kind of a fool would believe that it is enough to point to this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts as 'real', so-called 'reality'! Only as creators can we destroy! - But let us also not forget that in the long run it is enough to create new names and valuations and appearances of truth in order to create new 'things'. (Aphorism 58)
On the vanity of artists. — I believe that artists often do not know what they can do best because they are too vain and have set their minds on something prouder than these small plants seem to be that are new, strange, and beautiful and really capable of growing to perfection on their soil. That which in the last instance is good in their own garden and vineyard is not fully appreciated by them, and their love and insight are not of the same order. Here is a musician who, more than any other musician, is master at finding the tones from the realm of suffering, dejected, tormented souls and at giving speech even to the mute animals. Nobody equals him at the colours of late autumn, at the indescribably moving happiness of a last, very last, very briefest enjoy-ment; he knows a tone for those secret, uncanny midnights of the soul, where cause and effect seem to have gone awry and something can come to be 'from nothing' at any moment; more happily than anyone else, he draws from the very bottom of human happiness and so to speak from its drained cup, where the most bitter and repulsive drops have merged, for better or for worse, with the sweetest ones; he knows how the soul wearily drags itself along when it can no longer leap and fly, nor even walk; he has the shy glance of concealed pain, of understanding without solace, of taking farewell without confession; yes, as the Orpheus of all secret misery he is greater than anyone, and he has incorporated into art some things that seemed inexpressible and even unworthy of art, and which could only be scared away and not be grasped by words in particular - some very small and microscopic features of the soul: yes, he is master at the very small. But he doesn't want to be! His character likes great walls and bold frescoes much better! It escapes him that his spirit has a different taste and disposition and likes best of all to sit quietly in the corners of collapsed houses - there, hidden, hidden from himself, he paints his real masterpieces, which are all very short, often only a bar long - only there does he become wholly good, great, and perfect; perhaps only there. - But he doesn't know it! He is too vain to know it. (Aphorism 87, bolding my own.)
Against Christianity. — What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons. (Aphorism 132. Note: this is the whole aphorism.)
One thing is needful. — To 'give style' to one's character - a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and then fit them into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a great mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of first nature removed - both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it is reinterpreted into sublimity. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and employed for distant views — it is supposed to beckon towards the remote and immense. In the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small - whether the taste was good or bad means less than one may think; it's enough that it was one taste! It will be the strong and domineering natures who experience their most exquisite pleasure under such coercion, in being bound by but also perfected under their own law; the passion of their tremendous will becomes less intense in the face of all stylized nature, all conquered and serving nature; even when they have palaces to build and gardens to design, they resist giving nature free rein. Conversely, it is the weak characters with no power over themselves who hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitterly evil compulsion were to be imposed on them, they would have to become commonplace under it - they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such minds - and they may be of the first rank - are always out to shape or interpret their environment as free nature - wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising - and they are well advised to do so, because only thus do they please themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself - be it through this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually prepared to avenge himself for this, and we others will be his victims if only by having to endure his sight. For the sight of something ugly makes one bad and gloomy. (Aphorism 290)
What one should learn from artists. - What means do we have for making things beautiful, attractive, and desirable when they are not? And in themselves I think they never are! Here we have something to learn from physicians, when for example they dilute something bitter or add wine and sugar to the mixing bowl; but even more from artists, who are really constantly out to invent new artistic tours de force of this kind. To distance oneself from things until there is much in them that one no longer sees and much that the eye must add in order to see them at all, or to see things around a corner and as if they were cut out and extracted from their context, or to place them so that each partially distorts the view one has of the others and allows only perspectival glimpses, or to look at them through coloured glass or in the light of the sunset, or to give them a surface and skin that is not fully transparent: all this we should learn from artists while otherwise being wiser than they For usually in their case this delicate power stops where art ends and life begins; we, however, want to be poets of our lives, starting with the smallest and most commonplace details. (Aphorism 299)
The danger of the happiest. — To have refined senses and a refined taste; to be accustomed to the exquisite and most excellent things of the spirit as one is to the proper and most usual food; to enjoy a strong, bold, audacious soul; to go through life with a calm eye and a firm step, always prepared for the most extreme situations - as for a feast and full of yearning for undiscovered worlds and seas, people, and gods; to hearken to all cheerful music as if brave men, soldiers, seafarers were perhaps seeking a short rest and merriment there - and in the deepest pleasure of the moment to be overcome by tears and the whole crimson melancholy of the happy: who would not like all of this to be his possession, his state! It was the happiness of Homer! The happiness of the one who invented their gods for the Greeks - I mean, his gods for himself! But don't disregard the fact that with this Homeric happiness in one's soul one is also more capable of suffering than any other creature under the sun! Only at this price can one buy the most precious shell hitherto washed ashore by the waves of existence! As its owner, one becomes ever more refined in pain and eventually too refined; in the end, any slight discontentment and disgust was enough to spoil life for Homer. He had been unable to solve a silly little riddle posed to him by some young fishermen! Yes, the little riddles are the danger for those who are happiest! (Aphorism 302)
In favour of criticism. — Something you formerly loved as a truth or a probability now strikes you as an error; you cast it off and believe your reason has made a victory. But maybe that error was as necessary for you then, when you were still another person - you are always another person - as are all your present 'truths', like a skin that concealed and covered many things you weren't allowed to see yet. It is your new life, not your reason, that has killed that opinion for you: you don't need it any more, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize, we are not doing something arbitrary and impersonal; it is, at least very often, proof that there are living, active forces within us shedding skin. We negate and have to negate because something in us wants to live and affirm itself, something we might not yet know or see! — This in favour of criticism. (Aphorism 307)
On meeting again. — A.: Do I still understand you rightly? You are searching? Where is your corner and star within the real world? Where can you lie down in the sun so that an abundance of well-being comes to you, too, and your existence justifies itself? Let everyone do that for himself - you seem to me to be saying - and let everyone put out of his mind generalities and worries about others and about society! B: I want more than that; I am no seeker. I want to create for myself a sun of my own. (Aphorism 320)
(...) Already one is ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages - one lives like someone who might always "miss out on something'. 'Rather do anything than nothing' - even this principle is a cord to strangle all culture and all higher taste. Just as all forms are visibly being destroyed by the haste of the workers, so, too, is the feeling for form itself, the ear and eye for the melody of movements. The proof of this lies in the crude obviousness which is universally demanded in all situations in which people want for once to be honest with others - in their relations with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, students, leaders, and princes: one no longer has time and energy for ceremony, for civility with detours, for esprit in conversation, and in general for any otium. For life in a hunt for profit constantly forces people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretence or out-smarting or forestalling others: the true virtue today is doing something in less time than someone else. And thus hours in which honesty is allowed are rare; during them, however, one is tired and wants not only to 'let oneself go' but also to lay oneself down and stretch oneself out unceremoniously to one's full length and breadth. This is the way people now write letters, the style and spirit of which will always be the true 'sign of the times'. If sociability and the arts still offer any delight, it is the kind of delight that overworked slaves make for themselves. How frugal our educated and uneducated have become concerning 'joy'! How they are becoming increasingly suspicious of all joy! More and more, work gets all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a 'need to recuperate' and is starting to be ashamed of itself. 'One owes it to one's health' - that is what one says when caught on an excursion in the countryside. Soon we may well reach the point where one can't give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. Well, formerly it was the other way around: work was afflicted with a bad conscience. A person of good family concealed the fact that he worked if need compelled him to work. The slave worked under the pressure of the feeling that he was doing something contemptible: 'doing' was itself contemptible. 'Nobility and honour are attached solely to otium and bellum' - that was the ancient prejudice! (Aphorism 329. I commented out the beginning of this aphorism because it has a distracting rhetorical device: Nietzsche often inverts European prejudices (e.g. racial stereotypes of indigenous Americans) and places them on Europeans, but for a modern reader these passages are distasteful. He did that here. Use inspect element to see the passage if you wish.)
One must learn to love. — This happens to us in music: first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as a life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression, and kindheartedness about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we are used to it; when we expect it; when we sense that we'd miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But this happens to us not only in music: it is in just this way that we have learned to love everything we now love. We are always rewarded in the end for our good will, our patience, our fair-mindedness and gentleness with what is strange, as it gradually casts off its veil and presents itself as a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even he who loves himself will have learned it this way - there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned. (Aphorism 334)
(...) For he would then know that there neither are nor can be actions that are all the same; that every act ever performed was done in an altogether unique and unrepeatable way, and that this will be equally true of every future act; that all prescriptions of action (even the most inward and subtle rules of all moralities so far) relate only to their rough exterior; that these prescriptions may yield an appearance of sameness, but only just an appearance; that as one observes or recollects any action, it is and remains impenetrable; that our opinions about 'good' and 'noble' and 'great' can never be proven true by our actions because every act is unknowable; that our opinions, valuations, and tables of what is good are certainly some of the most powerful levers in the machinery of our actions, but that in each case, the law of its mechanism is unprovable. Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and value judgements and to the creation of tables of what is good that are new and all our own: let us stop brooding over the 'moral value of our actions'! Yes, my friends, it is time to feel nauseous about some people's moral chatter about others. Sitting in moral judgement should offend our taste. Let us leave such chatter and such bad taste to those who have nothing to do but drag the past a few steps further through time and who never live in the present - that is, to the many, the great majority! We, however, want to become who me are - human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best students and discoverers of everything lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be creators in this sense - while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been built on ignorance of physics or in contradiction to it. So, long live physics! And even more long live what compels us to it — our honesty! (Aphorism 335. Too long to include in entirety.)
The heaviest weight. - What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you want this again and innumerable times again?' would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (Aphorism 341)
The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and you must sail the seas, you emigrants, you too are compelled to this by - a faith! (The end of Aphorism 377.)
On the question of being understandable. - One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be under-stood. It is by no means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it incomprehensible: perhaps that was part of the author's intention - he didn't want to be understood by just 'anybody'. Every nobler spirit and taste selects his audience when he wants to communicate; in selecting it, he simultaneously erects barriers against 'the others'. All subtler laws of a style originated therein: they simultaneously keep away, create a distance, forbid 'entrance', understanding, as said above - while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours. And let me say this amongst ourselves and about my own case: I want neither the inexperience nor the liveliness of my temperament to keep me from being understandable to you, my friends - not the liveliness, as much as it forces me to deal with a matter swiftly in order to deal with it at all. For I approach deep problems such as I do cold baths: fast in, fast out. That this is no way to get to the depths, to get deep enough, is the superstition of those who fear water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. Oh, the great cold makes one fast! And incidentally: does a matter stay unrecognized, not understood, merely because it has been touched in flight; is only glanced at, seen in a flash? Does one absolutely have to sit firmly on it first? Have brooded on it as on an egg? Diu noctuque incubando, as Newton said of himself? At least there are truths that are especially shy and ticklish and can't be caught except suddenly - that one must surprise or leave alone. Finally, my brevity has yet another value: given the questions that occupy me, I must say many things briefly so that they will be heard even more briefly. For, as an immoralist, one needs to avoid corrupting innocents - I mean, asses and old maids of both sexes to whom life offers nothing but their innocence; even more, my writing should inspire, elevate, and encourage them to be virtuous. (...) (Aphorism 381. Also too long to include entirely.)
Trans-national America (Bourne)
An essay published in 1916 by Randolph Bourne which, among other things voices a rejection of American assimilationism in favor of multiculturalism. I read Bourne articulates my experience of ethnic and cultural identity far better than I ever have myself.
What has happened in states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new potency. The process has not been at all the fancied "assimilation" of the Scandinavian or Teuton. Rather has it been a process of their assimilation of us—I speak as an Anglo-Saxon. The foreign cultures have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous Americanism, but have remained distinct but coöperating to the greater glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all the native "Americanism" around them.
What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity. Already we have far too much of this insipidity,-masses of people who are cultural half-breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor nationals of another culture. Each national colony in this country seems to retain in its foreign press, its vernacular literature, its schools, its intellectual and patriotic leaders, a central cultural nucleus. From this nucleus the colony extends out by imperceptible gradations to a fringe where national characteristics are all but lost. Our cities are filled with these half-breeds who retain their foreign names but have lost the foreign savor. This does not mean that they have actually been changed into New Englanders or Middle Westerners. It does not mean that they have been really Americanized. It means that, letting slip from them whatever native culture they had, they have substituted for it only the most rudimentary American—the American culture of the cheap newspaper, the "movies," the popular song, the ubiquitous auto-mobile. The unthinking who survey this class call them assimilated, Americanized. The great American public school has done its work. With these people our institutions are safe. We may thrill with dread at the aggressive hyphenate, but this tame flabbiness is accepted as Americanization. The same moulders of opinion whose ideal is to melt the different races into Anglo-Saxon gold hail this poor product as the satisfying result of their alchemy.
(...)
Just so surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture do we tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those of the mob. We sentence them to live on the most rudimentary planes of American life. The influences at the centre of the nuclei are centripetal. They make for the intelligence and the social values which mean an enhancement of life. And just because the foreign-born retains this expressiveness is he likely to be a better citizen of the American community. The influences at the fringe, however, are centrifugal, anarchical. They make for detached fragments of peoples. Those who came to find liberty achieve only license. They become the flotsam and jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see in our slovenly towns, our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural wreckage of our time, and it is from the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the other stocks that it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating force. It makes too easily for this detritus of cultures. In our loose, free country, no constraining national purpose, no tenacious folk-tradition and folk-style hold the people to a line.
The war has shown us that not in any magical formula will this purpose be found. No intense nationalism of the European plan can be ours. But do we not begin to see a new and more adventurous ideal? Do we not see how the national colonies in America, deriving power from the deep cultural heart of Europe and yet living here in mutual toleration, freed from the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and dynasties, may work out a federated ideal? America is transplanted Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse.
America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old nationalism, —belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding, the poison of which we are witnessing now in Europe,-is to make patriotism a hollow sham, and to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a follower and not a leader of nations.
If we come to find this point of view plausible, we shall have to give up the search for our native "American" culture. With the exception of the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively American culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cul-tures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain. This will not mean, however, that there are not expressions of indigenous genius that could not have sprung from any other soil. Music, poetry, philosophy, have been singularly fertile and new. Strangely enough, American genius has flared forth just in those directions which are least under-standed of the people.
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The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find that we have all unawares been building up the first international nation. The voices which have cried for a tight and jealous nationalism of the European pattern are failing. From that ideal, however valiantly and disinterestedly it has been set for us, time and tendency have moved us further and further away. What we have achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature, the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun. Nowhere else has such contiguity been anything but the breeder of misery. Here, notwithstanding our tragic failures of adjustment, the outlines are already too clear not to give us a new vision and a new orientation of the American mind in the world.
It is for the American of the younger generation to accept this cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with self-conscious and fruitful purpose. In his colleges, he is already getting, with the study of modern history and politics, the modern literatures, economic geography, the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook such as the people of no other nation of to-day in Europe can possibly secure. If he is still a colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture, but of many. He is a colonial of the world.
Colonialism has grown into cosmopolitanism, and his mother-land is no one nation, but all who have anything life-enhancing to offer to the spirit. That vague sympathy which the France of ten years ago was feeling for the world—a sympathy which was drowned in the terrible reality of war-may be the modern American's, and that in a positive and aggressive sense. If the American is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or cowardice. His provincialism is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect of his imagination.
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Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American—and in this category I include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the pioneer spirit and a sense of new social vistas—has the chance to become that citizen of the world. America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision.
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No mere doubtful triumphs of the past, which redound to the glory of only one of our trans-nationalities, can satisfy us. It must be a future America, on which all can unite, which pulls us irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more warmly.
To make real this striving amid dangers and apathies is work for a younger intelligentsia of America. Here is an enterprise of integration into which we can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which should make us, if the final menace ever came, not weaker, but infinitely strong.