Toward the Recovery of American Culture

As a cultural subject in, and by extension of, hypermodern America, you cannot believe in Rousseau’s return to nature, or Winckelmann’s return to the ancients, or the late Romantic insistence on the imaginative power of the poet. The closest you’ll get to the sacred is liking pictures of cathedrals on X, and the only way you’ll approach the infinite is through the secularized infinity of the scroll. Whenever you consume content, which is daily, if not constantly, you displace, and disgrace, the traces of the classics you came into contact with during the course of your education. Content is a weed that takes up your garden, and chokes out the fat vines upon which the soul had planned to feed.