If the new world exploration did not come to anything like its happy expected fulfillment even in North America, where the odds were more favorable, it was because the new colonizers and settlers brought so much of the Old World in their refined equipment and their brutal customs with them. The wonder is rather that the hopeful dream has remained alive for so long, for some of its original luminosity still dazzles and blinds the eyes of many of our contemporaries who continue to pursue the same archaic fantasies, planning further voyages through outer space. Contemporary 'space age' prophets, who proclaim space exploration as the endless frontier and astronauts as the coming pioneers, throw an unrealistic glamour over both the past, and even more, the future of such efforts.

In a sense the dramatic dialogue is both the fullest symbol and the final justification of the city's life. For the same reason, the most revealing symbol of the city's failure, of its very non-existence as a social personality, is the absence of dialogue-not necessarily a silence, but equally the loud sound of a chorus uttering the same words in cowed if complacent conformity. The silence of a dead city has more dignity than the vocalisms of a community that knows neither detachment nor dialectic opposition, neither ironic comment nor stimulating disparity, neither an intelligent conflict nor an active moral resolution. Such a drama is bound to have a fatal last act.

Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread: man's true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations.