Posted on 05/26/2005 6:06:04 AM PDT by quidnunc
When to the moment I shall say
‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’
Then mayst thou fetter me straightway
Then to the abyss will I depart!
Most of us bandy the term ‘Faustian’ fairly loosely — I do myself in this week’s Star Wars review. But Goethe’s version of the actual bet is much more particular than it’s generally summarised as: when Mephistopheles shows up, he promises he’ll do anything Faust wants of him. But if Faust ever becomes so content, so happy with ‘the moment’ that he wants time to linger awhile — that he wants to live in that moment for ever — then he will depart to the abyss and the devil will have his soul for all eternity.
That’s a bigger problem today — not the devil-getting-your-soul part (we’ll wait and see on that) but the living-in-the-moment bit. Permanence is the illusion of every age, but it’s especially powerful in our time, reinforced by electronic media and other marvels that make ours much more of a present-tense culture than that of our grandfathers or great-great-grandfathers. That was the somewhat self-congratulatory message of the VE Day anniversary: 60 years ago, the Germans were operating a vast bureaucracy created to process the mass murder of Jews; the rest of the Continent was at each other’s throats. Now a bare half-century later Europeans live in harmony, spending so much on cradle-to-grave welfare that their decrepit militaries couldn’t invade each other even if they wanted to, which, given that it would cut into their two months’ paid holiday a year, they don’t. True, the Germans are now as obnoxiously pacifist as once they were aggressively militarist, but who can argue that if one has to err in one direction or another, today’s isn’t preferable?
So ‘Europhiles’ say to the moment, ‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’ That’s what the European constitution boils down to — an attempt to freeze the moment, to make time stand still in a permanent EUtopia so fair it should be constitutionally required to linger eternally. Virtually the entire European governing class has made no useful contribution to the French and Dutch referendum campaigns except to insist that this moment is for ever — or as the Netherlands’ foreign minister Bernard Bot reprimanded his ingrate electorate, ‘You have to understand the nature of the times in which you live.’
-snip-
I see that. As always, he's exactly right about everything, as far as I can tell.
Has anyone started a Mark Steyn ping list? He has no shortage of fans on FR.
Pokey78 has the Steyn ping list.
Roger. Thanks.
Anytime. His (her?) ping list doesn't hit everything, though. I wish John Robinson would get us the "search by author" function!
I love Mark Steyn.
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