"Modernity" in the perspective of the metaphor of nourishment
and digestion.-
Sensibility immensely more irritable (-dressed up moralistically: the
increase in pity-); the abundance of disparate impressions greater than
ever: cosmopolitanism in foods, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even
landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo; the impressions erase each
other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply,
to "digest" anything; a weakening of the power to digest results
from this. A kind of adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place:
men unlearn spontaneous action, they merely react to stimuli from outside.
They spend their strength partly in assimilating things, partly in defense,
partly in opposition. Profound weakening of spontaneity: the historian,
critic, analyst, the interpreter, the observer, the collector, the
reader-all of them reactive talents -all science!
Artificial change of one's nature into a "mirror"; interested
but, as it were, merely epidermically interested; a coolness on principle, a
balance, a fixed low temperature closely underneath the thin surface on
which warmth, movement, "tempest," and the play of waves are
encountered.
Opposition of external mobility and a certain deep heaviness and
weariness.
