this is a kind of funny place to hang out on a full moon. never forget that.

Is it just me or is tineye getting worse? Is there a solid alternative?

THE BOURGEOIS MIND

What does the word bourgeois actually mean?

It has remained unexplained, though it has been so much used and so often misapplied. Even when superficially used it is a word with a magic power of its own, and its depth has to be fathomed. The word designates a spiritual state, a direction of the soul, a peculiar consciousness of being. It is neither a social nor an economic condition, yet it is something more than a psychological and ethical one—it is spiritual, ontological. In the very depths of his being, or non-being, the bourgeois is distinguishable from the not-bourgeois; he is a man of a particular spirit, or particular soullessness. The state of being bourgeois has always existed in the world, and its immortal image is for ever fixed in the gospels with its equally immortal antithesis, but in the nineteenth century it attained its climax and ruled supreme.

Though the middle-class society of the last century is so spoken of in the superficial social-economic significance of the term, it is bourgeois in a deeper and more spiritual sense. This middle-class mentality ripened and enslaved human society and culture at the summit of their civilization. Its concupiscence is no longer restricted by man’s supernatural beliefs as it was in past epochs, it is no longer kept in bounds by the sacred symbolism of a nobler traditional culture; the bourgeois spirit emancipated itself, expanded, and was at last able to express its own type of life.

But even when the triumph of mediocrity was complete a few deep thinkers denounced it with uncompromising power: Carlyle, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Léon Bloy, Dostoievsky, Leontiev—all foresaw the victory of the bourgeois spirit over a truly great culture, on the ruins of which it would establish its own hideous kingdom.

With prophetic force and fire these men denounced the spiritual sources and foundations of middle-classdom and, repelled by its ugliness, thirsting for a nobler culture, a different life, looked back upon Greece or the middle ages, the Renaissance or Byzantium. Leontiev has stated the problem strikingly:

Is it not dreadful and humiliating to think that Moses went up upon Sinai, the Greeks built their lovely temples, the Romans waged their Punic wars, Alexander, that handsome genius in a plumed helmet, fought his battles, apostles preached, martyrs suffered, poets sang, artists painted, knights shone at tournaments—only that some French, German, Russian bourgeois garbed in unsightly and absurd clothes should enjoy life ‘individually’ or ‘collectively’ on the ruins of all this vanished splendour?

History has failed, there is no such thing as historical progress, and the present is in no wise an improvement upon the past: there was more beauty in the past. A period of high cultural development is succeeded by another wherein culture deteriorates qualitatively. The will to power, to well-being, to wealth, triumphs over the will to holiness, to genius. The highest spiritual achievements belong to the past, spirituality is on the wane, and a time of spiritual decline is a time of bourgeois ascendancy.

The knight and the monk, the philosopher and the poet, have been superseded by a new type—the greedy bourgeois conqueror, organizer, and trader. The centre of life is displaced and transferred to its periphery, the organic hierarchical order of life is being destroyed. In the new machine-made industrial-capitalist civilization of Europe and America the spiritual culture of the old West, based on a sacred symbolism and sacred tradition, is being irrevocably annihilated.

there is a hidden elixir that begins to flow from the full moon to the new.

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