It is amazing to note the contrast between ancient and modern texts. There is in the ancients an innocence—at least, this seems to us to be the right word—that causes us strangeness. We cannot understand them: there are texts that sound to us like they were written by children, or by beings from another race, inhabitants of another world. More: the ancients, for the most part, almost always sought to deal with the essential—something very rare in modern times, where literature is devoted to the trivial. The ancient texts are distinguished by the expression of an admiration, a reverence toward the reality that seems unimaginable to us. Modern man is devoid of the faculty of wonder: for him, existence is tedious and the world boring, old and banal.
The Contrast Between Ancient and Modern Texts
