The truth that we will never fully be at one with ourselves and that our necessarily imperfect self-knowledge will always constrict and distort our knowledge of the world. The truth that no "alternative" path to esoteric wisdom exists to release us from the intrinsic uncertainties of human knowledge and action. The truth that the beauty of the

… we must never forget the lesson of Oedipus with which we began: that the urges to confront or to flee the truth are present in all of us. The harder the truth, the greater the temptation to escape it.

The shock of the new has been replaced by the shock of the ephemeral. Even if material and social conditions of life improve over time, those improvements cannot but seem just as improvised and tentative as what preceded them. All this can leave us feeling like exiles without our having crossed a single border, without even walking out the front

The more the nineteenth century progressed in science, industry, and even politics, the more nostalgic it became in spirit. Such are the hydraulics of historical consciousness.

All history is pastiche. In preliterate societies, collective memories from the distant past are embedded in rituals; they are remembered by being reenacted, not read. Literate societies remember through articulate myths and narratives whose secondhand, constructed nature has to be veiled if the stories are to hold their power.

Psychologists suggest that suffering nostalgics do not really want to possess the lost object, they only want to preserve the bittersweet desire for it. Actually retrieving it or accepting its loss would rob them of a feeling they have structured their lives around. They are stuck, and their resistance to getting unstuck is tenacious, since it

Any lesson, even a necessary one, can be learned too well. There is a comfort in being disabused, a pride in turning up the lights and puncturing illusions that induces a different kind of blindness that needs to be challenged.

Innocence is an illusion. We come into this world a bundle of disordered drives and desires, some good, some not. We are neither pure nor impure, we are only somewhat educable. There is an art to transforming raw youths into decent mature adults, and its tools are experience and knowledge. Some of it is pleasant, some less so. And for every gain in

…we are simultaneously confused about how to carry out our responsibilities to children and about what it means to be an adult. We seem to have settled instead on keeping everyone in the perpetual limbo of adolescence, rushing children into a state they are unprepared for, and allowing adults to remain there as long as they would like. Peter Pan