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“ ”The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. We built our empires on a pellet of dust revolving around a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphynx, with the human face and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science; and yet, in our daily lives, we were becoming a race of somnambulists, whose very breathing, in train and bus and car, was timed to the movement of the wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all.
About Alfred Noyes
Alfred Noyes (16 September 1880 – 28 June 1958) was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Additional quotes by Alfred Noyes
"I like youth, and I like the real newness, which always seems to me to be a development out of the old — not a bombshell. But I'm not sure that some of the writers who are claiming those qualities today are as new and young as the elderly critics tell us. I feel surest of my young writers when I don't hear their joints creaking with the strain to be new.
...
"We must remember how badly Keats and Shelley were treated in their day, mustn't we?"
"But the Della Cruscans, who were really bad, were sat upon, too, weren't they?" said Miss Bird. "And, after all, your argument would apply to bosh as well as to beautiful things."
"Victorian, Miss Bird, Victorian," said Basil, wagging a playful finger at her. He had never heard of the Della Cruscan poets, but it was one of his principles never to give himself away in such things. "The conventional mind is the enemy, you know, in this country. I always admire that fellow — what's his name — who dedicated his book in those six words: 'To the British Public, these pearls!' We must think for ourselves. We mustn't be too conventional, you know."
"But — that's exactly — I don't want to think what the fashion of the moment and the newspapers tell me I ought to think. At least, I don't want to do it mechanically. And I don't mean what you think I mean," stammered poor Miss Bird, blushing and puzzled at her inability to penetrate that superior armor with a perfectly sound and pointed weapon. The Helmstone debates had not yet taught her that you cannot argue with an alleged "modern" who is so pleased with himself (and so ancient a type) that he waives your own remarks and hears nothing but his own blood purring in his ears."
I'll come to thee by moonlight,
though hell should bar the way.
I long to get away, sometimes, from my own generation. I don't care whether it's into the past, or into the future, so long as it's away from the patter into simple realities again. I hate being a slave to my own age.
...
We are so afraid of sentimentality that we're losing the power of human feeling. Our writers today understand all the brutalities and cynicisms; but how many of them understand the simple human affections that hold decent human beings together and make the world worth living in?