PARTISAN
REVIEW
155
art.
,These are the tradition - the past consciousness redeemed within
the present. But, being redeemed, it forms a totality which encloses
the consciousness of the living.
Contemporary attitudes are conditioned by so many circum–
stances - political, economic and merely fashionable - that however
progressive and "objectively" scientific they may be, to live inside
them is to shut out multiple time.-points. The past is - or ought to
be -
the door opening onto freedom from today, a contemporary
time-prison. It offers the possibility of seeing life from the point of
view of that immense majority of mankind who are the dead.
The force of the tradition in Europe has simply been the pres–
ence of the past in daily life as a palpable and working influence;
as though in Paris, London, Prague, and in sculptured and terraced
Tuscan or
Proven~al
or Rhineland landscapes, time-turrets were ele–
vated from which
it
was possible to look down on the present.
One of the deepest causes of the resentment of Europeans by
American visitors - ranging from Emerson and Hawthorne to Ed–
mund Wilson - is that Europeans - and particularly the English–
make
claims
to superiority which are based on nothing more than
the achievements of their ancestors. Americans have great insight
into the polymorphous snobbery of Europeans about monuments
which they identify with their own flesh, while they lack the spirit of
those who made them. Edmund Wilson accuses Europeans of over–
rating both the European culture and their own interest in it. This
may well be true. However the point is that in Europe the past has
existed like an extra time-dimension and that, whether or not they
are worthy of
it
or even really appreciate it, certain Europeans do
live - or have lived - in that past (as have also certain European–
ized Americans).
Living in the past may be a form of decadence, an abdication
from life; and perhaps the only way to live in the modern world is
to be completely contemporary:
il taut etre absoluement moderne.
All the same, when all is said, to see the whole of human life on
this
planet from the standpoint of the contemporary "continuous
present" is to abdicate ninety-nine hundredths of human conscious–
ness on
this
planet.
It may be that the result of the civilization of transformation
