A Commonplace Book

For a generation dominated by the individualistic attitude, it is not unnatural that the living moment should loom larger than all time. The result is that, being cut off from the long process that has given us all our human values, we now tend to become provincials in time. Just as the provincial in the usual geographic and social sense judges all things by the prevailing conceptions of his province, scorning the larger world, so do we now tend more and more to appraise our own literary products solely in the light that is peculiar to our agitated moment. The attempt to render absolute judgments with only the data of a limited reference scheme has always been the supreme tragedy (or is it comedy?) of human thought.