Background
The book originated in his experience as a soldier during World War I, through which he was forced to realize "that war was one thing to the soldiers of all nations and another thing to the people at home." His intention in writing, he says, is to "bequeath a lasting memory" of this experience to the next generations, with the design of overcoming a particular kind of inertia, a tendency to regard the sanity-shattering upheavals by which new epochs are initiated as though these only append a new chapter to the end of events that have passed. This tendency to analyze without sympathy the events even of one's own lifetime, Rosenstock-Huessy depicts as a willful and tragic forgetfulness. We must experience the rewriting of history in our lifetime, he said, because "the world's history is our own history"; otherwise, "it would be nothing but a hopeless library of dust".
Read more about this topic: Out Of Revolution
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)