Sublime

I am forced, against all my hopes and inclinations, to regard the history of my people here as the progress of the doom of what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households.

a thirst for some loyalty that shall unify life,

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.

Only part of this great change impinges directly upon the literary enterprise. But the overall rescripting of all societal premises is bound to affect reading and writing immensely. The formerly stable system—the axis with writer at one end, editor, publisher, and bookseller in the middle, and reader at the other end—is slowly being bent into a pre

his greatest work may yet prove to be the perpetuation of the joyful mystery of Christmas.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

He was conservative because he cared for their past, and liberal because he cared for their future. But he was much more than this.

fascists.