Source: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 6 : Where the Tree Falls
Context: In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.
“There is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.”
The Five faces of Corruption, p. 31 (See also: Samuel P. Huntington..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)
The Daily News, 1919, as cited in "The Riddle of Erskine Childers" By Andrew Boyle, Hutchinson, London, (1977), pg. 260.
Literary Years and War (1900-1918), Last Years: Ireland (1919-1922)
Je savais que le bien comme le mal est affaire de routine, que le temporaire se prolonge, que l'extérieur s'infiltre au dedans, et que le masque, à la longue, devient visage.
Source: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), p. 97
“What's old collapses, times change,
And new life blossoms in the ruins.”
Act IV, sc. ii
Wilhelm Tell (1803)
Song for St. Cecilia's Day (1692).
Context: When time itself shall be no more,
And all things in confusion hurl'd,
Music shall then exert it's power,
And sound survive the ruins of the world:
Then saints and angels shall agree
In one eternal jubilee:
All Heaven shall echo with their hymns divine,
And God himself with pleasure see
The whole creation in a chorus join.
Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 11
Wear and Tears (tableu of a ageless world)
Specters of Marx (1993)
Context: The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth-one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps. The time is out of joint. Theatrical speech, Hamlet's speech before the theater of the world, of history, and of politics. The age is off its hinges. Everything, beginning with time, seems out of kilter, unjust, dis-adjusted. The world is going very badly, it wears as it grows, as the Painter also says at the beginning of Timon of Athens (which is Marx's play, is it not). For, this time, it is a painter's speech, as if he were speaking of a spectacle or before a tableau: "How goes the world?-It wears, sir, as it grows.
