This excellent little book is being held hostage by ridiculous publishers who are listing it for a king's ransom. Try to find it in a library or on ILL if you can--it is a worthy topic. My husband has been reading parts of it aloud to me, and I intend to read the whole book (it is short) myself when he is finished. The quote below encapsulates a lot of what I think about the post modern, post secular condition.
"Anxiety is inherent to all forms of modernity and is indeed a product of it: modernity creates anxiety and this is because modernity demands change. Anxiety is the flipside of flux and transgression. Modernity cannot accept the world as it currently is, and so we are anxious for change. But then the effect of change is to make us anxious about our futures and our place in the world. So we are anxious to create change and anxious because of change. It is not, we might say, a question of status anxiety, but of anxiety as status."
Peter King, The Antimodern Condition: An Argument Against Progress. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014, p. 51, bold face emphasis mine.
That is a powerful and hard hitting way to look at anxiety (something I've been intimately acquainted with all my life). Thank you for sharing this passage with us. I think that one can live in the moment and not be anxious for the future, but it can be a challenge for sure, especially when compounded by the stresses of life and worries about things either past or far off down the road of life.
ReplyDeleteMany heartfelt thanks as well for your caring, supportive comment today's post, dear Juliana, it means a great deal to me.
♥ Jessica
Interesting! I had to read that and re-read that. Definitely food for thought
ReplyDelete