Sublime

So that’s the story so far: in search of social belonging, and the blessed shortcuts that we can take when we’re in the presence of like-minded people, we come to rely on keywords, and then metaphors, and then myths—and at every stage habits become more deeply ingrained in us, habits that inhibit our ability to think.

Protagoras observed a strange paradox about language. Despite the perpetual flux and change of the physical world, language lends the mistaken impression that the world is not in flux, that it is stable. As the Presocratic philosopher Empedocles had observed only a few years before, ‘there is no birth for any mortal thing, nor any cursed end in

Macaulay believed that the disjunctions that afflicted us were intrinsic to the human condition and there was no permanent escape from them.

Gerade weil so viele Gruppen von Expertinnen, Politikerinnen und Medien ein Interesse daran haben, Bedrohungen beim Namen zu nennen, können wir sagen, dass liberale Gesellschaften die Furcht mitnichten beseitigt, sondern in Wirklichkeit in eine umfassende Gefühlsstruktur verwandelt haben.

To conceal meaning (it was reasoned) is equally to conceal lack of meaning….

Vasily Grossman

we need to make a vital distinction: between those who held what we now believe to be a profoundly mistaken view, or tolerated such a view, simply because it was common in their time, and those who were the architects of and advocates for such a view.