modernity

Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had tittered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn't known what to say. ("Smoke Ghost")

Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time.Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")

I chase goals, not girls.

The only way to gain power in a world that is moving too fast is to learn to slow down. And the only way to spread one__ influence wide to learn how to go deep. The world we want for ourselves and our children will not emerge from electronic speed but rather from a spiritual stillness that takes root in our souls. Then, and only then, will we create a world that reflects the heart instead of shattering it.

What constitutes the pleasure of the traveler is the obstacle, the fatigue, the peril itself. What pleasure can there be in an excursion where one is always sure of arriving, finding ready horses, a soft bed, an excellent supper, and all the comforts one can enjoy at home. One of the great misfortunes of modern life is the lack of the sudden surprise, the absence of all adventures. Everything is so well regulated, so well meshed, so well labeled, that chance is no longer possible; another century of perfection, and each one will be able to foresee, from the day of his birth, what will happen to him until the day of his death. Human will will be completely annihilated. No more crimes, no more virtues, no more physiognomies, no more originality. It will become impossible to distinguish a Russian from a Spaniard, an Englishman from a Chinese, a Frenchman from an American. People will not even be able to recognize one another, for everyone will be same. Then an immense boredom will seize the universe, and suicide will decimate the population of the globe, for the principal spring of life__uriosity__ill have been destroyed forever.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.

Modernity kills ghostly romance("The Undying Thing")

Give as much as importance to your goal as you give it to your first girlfriend, with that much importance your girlfriend might still leave you but your goal will definitely come to you.

This is what made the difference, they used social networking for entertainment and I used it for business.

The great pagan sadness of modern man is largely due to his premonition of ultimate disaster.

If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don__ admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don__ do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.

Modern anxiety is expressed in the longing for what most people fear, even as modern grief is expressed in the unconsummated mourning for what they never really had.

Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.

Ties are straightened and expressions banished.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.

The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished.

In the white man's world, language, too -- and the way which the white man thinks of it--has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language -- for the Word itself -- as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.

Although we, as Christians, are living in Sodom, we are not to become citizens of Sodom. . The story of Sodom is God's reminder to the modern world