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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER III: THE HEIGHT OF THE TIMES
Page 6
This is the point towards which all my discussion of the problem of the height of times was leading, and it turns out that it is precisely our time which in this matter enjoys a most strange sensation, unique, as far as I know, in recorded history. In the drawing-room gatherings of last century there inevitably arrived a moment when the ladies and their tame poets put this question, one to the other: "At what period of history would you like to have lived?" And straightaway each of them, making a bundle of his own personal existence, started off on an imaginary tramp along the roads of history in search of a period into which that existence might most delightfully fit. And the reason was that although feeling itself, because it felt itself, arrived at plenitude, the XIXth Century was still, in actual fact, bound to the past, on whose shoulders it thought it was standing; it saw itself actually as the culmination of that past. Hence it still believed in periods relatively classic- the age of Pericles, the Renaissance- during which the values that hold to-day were prepared. This should be enough to cause suspicion of these periods of plenitude; they have their faces turned backwards, their eyes are on the past which they consider fulfilled in themselves. And now, what would be the sincere reply of any representative man of to-day if such a question were put to him? I think there can be no doubt about it; any past time, without exception, would give him the feeling of a restricted space in which he could not breathe. That is to say, the man of to-day feels that his life is more a life than any past one, or, to put it the other way about, the entirety of past time seems small to actual humanity. This intuition as regards present-day existence renders null by its stark clarity any consideration about decadence that is not very cautiously thought out. To start with, our present life feels itself as ampler than all previous lives. How can it regard itself as decadent? Quite the contrary; what has happened is, that through sheer regard of itself as "more" life, it has lost all respect, all consideration for the past. Hence for the first time we meet with a period which makes tabula rasa of all classicism, which recognises in nothing that is past any possible model or standard, and appearing as it does after so many centuries without any break in evolution, yet gives the impression of a commencement, a dawn, an initiation, an infancy. We look backwards and the famous Renaissance reveals itself as a period of narrow provincialism, of futile gestures- why not say the word?- ordinary.