“Periodization sequesters human experience. The historicist separation of the past from the present prohibits empathy with the past and therefore precludes criticism in the present.”

— Russell Berman

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 18.

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Russell Berman 17

American academic 1950

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 18.

“No critic, not even a topical analyst, can escape seeing the musical past from a present perspective. But…the common-language approach of the topical-analyst critics permits a separation between present sensibility and the general sensibilities of the late eighteenth century, allowing for an ever-evolving dialogue between the vanished past and the evanescent present.”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, "Reading Mozart's Music", p.43.

“The reified focus on the moment of literary production, in a distanced context—the typical topic of periodization—suppresses the experience of reception, the actualization of the past in the reader’s present.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 20.

“Best not to mix the past with the present. The present paints the past with gold. The past paints the present with lead.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

“If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Source: Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

“This mythos comes to us, often in experiences called revelation, from the sages and the artists of past and present times.”

Ursula Goodenough book The Sacred Depths of Nature

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 174
Context: Humans need stories — grand compelling stories — that help to orient us in our lives in the cosmos. The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story — what we are calling religious naturalism — can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human-centered stories, a mythos that embodies our ideals and our passions. This mythos comes to us, often in experiences called revelation, from the sages and the artists of past and present times.