Man has always been his own most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself? If man insists that he is a child of nature and that he ought not to pretend to be more than the animal, he tacitly admits that he is, at any rate, a curious kind of animal who has both the inclination and the capacity to make such pretensions. If on the other hand he insists upon his unique and distinctive place in nature and points to his rational faculties as proof of his special eminence, there is usually an anxious note in his avowals of uniqueness which betrays his unconscious sense of kinship with the brutes.
—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Chapter 1.
Build Me No Monument
Build me no monument
Lest my memory be perverted to the uses
Of lying and oppression.
My lovers and their children must not be dispossessed of me;
I would be the untarnished possession forever
Of those for whom I lived.
—Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, Herman Altman.
Lest my memory be perverted to the uses
Of lying and oppression.
My lovers and their children must not be dispossessed of me;
I would be the untarnished possession forever
Of those for whom I lived.
—Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, Herman Altman.
Unreal City
Under the brown flog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and frequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and frequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
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