modernity

The people's need to share has turned into a massive disease. It has taken them to the most private meaningless part of their lives. In such circumstance, values become redefined and what has been worthless in the past, has become the core value of the new age. The disaster starts where the essence of the discourse changes. The modern age, with all its technological advances, has taken human to the fast fall. We are going down faster than being trapped into a mire. The transition of the discourse has also given us a great gift, senselessness. Therefore, we have transitioned into piles of senseless machines, drained of human essentiality and drowning into a giant mire. The sad part is, due to the lack of true sense, we don't even feel it. Our only safety guard, which is entirely absurd and phantasmagoric, comes from following the majority of the world's population. As long as we feel belonged to preponderancy, our nonsense will absolutely make sense.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it__ not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don__ want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development _ part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" _ has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so _ and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few _ have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author.

Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do.

Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically "modern" conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity.

Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the __vant-garde_ - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored.

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

Modern art has to be what is called __ntense._ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

When nations grow old the Arts grow coldAnd commerce settles on every tree

For better of for worse the church in the West bought modernity's claims. We were baptized in its story (even though it said it did not have one) and accepted its categories and definitions. But somewhere along the way we also began to believe that the ways in which we accessed knowledge about God or Jesus or the Spirit or Christianity were those things themselves.

Alecto, have you noticed how downhill this little island is becoming?_ Mandy questioned sadly. __ll these organic food stores and yoga studios and cellular phone towers_ Cape Breton was one of the only places left where it still had that nostalgic small town atmosphere but now_ I__e only been away for a year, how could things have changed so quickly? I mean, how can the world accept it?___'est la vie,_ said Alecto, looking extremely tired as he stared out the window at the late November maple keys fluttering down from vibrantly red trees lining the streets on either side of the windshield.

People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes.""You speak in riddles, aged progenitor.""The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or p-p-play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.

Modernity is kind of a tradition and tradition itself is not a rulebook. It's a dialogue and a dialectical process_ just as tradition affects us, we too affect tradition and culture, and we change it.

I'm not a guru. I wish you wouldn't pose these things at me, man. Ask me about women or something.

When they brought in communism it was for the people, so they killed the people. Now they've brought in capitalism, which is for the rich, so they only kill the rich. This time you and I have nothing to worry about.

But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals? Perhaps__ut this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision.

The modern West has been deeply split about freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, it has championed human freedom in many forms - human rights, sexual freedom, political liberty, freedom to choose in many spheres. On the other hand, many of its most intelligent members have not believed that people are free at all, and have devoted great efforts to show that really we are the product of our genes, our unconscious drives, our education, economic pressures, or other forms of conditioning.