presence, I don’t believe anything happens at a church service. I don’t understand the “this do in remembrance of me” aspect of Christianity: it seems silly, & I must think about it.
Entry, 8 Jan. 1950, 25, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
The religious bodies have enough problems of their own, but if they fail to meet the spiritual needs of society, the university will become the only source of free authority, and hence would be almost compelled to slip into the role of a lay church for intellectuals.
“The Ethics of Change: The Role of the University” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Churchill, Winston
I had the usual childish fantasies, when very young, of wanting to be a “great man” — fantasies that in our day only Churchill has realized. But Churchill’s greatness was archaic: his funeral really buried that whole conception of greatness as a social ambition.
Entry, Notebook 12 (1968–70), 66, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
Cincinnati
There are more people in Cincinnati than in Shakespeare’s London; but Cincinnati cannot produce genius. It isn’t the capital of anything: no organization of state or nation or anything else with a body comes to a head in it.
Entry, 24 Jan. 1949, 120, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
Cities
The map still shows us self-contained cities like Hamilton and Toronto, but experience presents us with an urban sprawl, which ignores national boundaries and buries a vast area of beautiful and fertile land in a tomb of concrete.
The Modern Century (1967), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Engineers, along with architects and town planners, are deeply involved with the physical appearance of society. And the briefest glance at our society shows a stupefying hideousness and squalor, with the great octopus sprawl of streets and highways and buildings swallowing all the fertility of the nature around us. When this process is applied to the natural environment, we call it pollution: when it is applied to the human environment, we call it development. But whatever we call it, something is badly wrong with the creative power of the society that has produced it.
“Universities and the Deluge of Cant” (1972), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The amount of mental distress caused by living in an environment which expresses indifference or contempt for the perspectives of the human body is very little studied: one might call it proportion pollution.
“Canada: New World Without Revolution” (1975), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
The city is the community become conscious: it is to the country what man is to animals. Animals live; man knows that he lives; people live in the country & often live very well, but in the city some additional consciousness comes to life.
Entry, 24 Jan. 1949, 120, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
Washington became a capital because it was in the logical place for one, between the north and the south: Ottawa became a capital because it was not Montreal or Kingston.
“National Consciousness in Canadian Culture” (1976), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Citizens
A citizen’s primary duty, I should think, is to try to know what should be changed in his society and what conserved. The operative word here is “know.”
“Universities and the Deluge of Cant” (1972), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
It is essential for the teacher of literature, at every level, to remember that in a modern democracy a citizen participates in society mainly through his imagination.
“Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship” (1963), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Civilization
But for better or worse, our civilization, if it survives at all, will be one in which criticism and literature, that is, the theory and practice of literature itself, will be two parts of one thing.
“Literary Criticism” (1963), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
Civilization is not merely an imitation of nature, but the process of making a total human form out of nature, and it is impelled by the force that we have just called desire.
“Second Essay: Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
In the civilized state of humanity we love those who are close to us: for those farther away we feel the tolerance and good will which express love at a distance. In the pure state of nature we feel only possessive about those close to us, and hostile and mistrustful of those further away. The latter do all sorts of vaguely irritating things, like speaking different languages, eating different foods, and holding different beliefs.
The Double Vision (1991), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
The totality of imaginative power, of which the matrix is art, is what we ordinarily call culture or civilization.
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
The oldest civilization in the modern world is the American one, which was established in its present form in 1776.
“The Church and Modern Culture” (1950), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Clarity
No darkness can comprehend any light; no ignorance or indifference can ever see any claritas in literature itself or in the criticism that attempts to convey it, just as no saint in ordinary life wears a visible gold plate around his head.
“Criticism, Visible and Invisible” (1964), using claritas as a synonym for clarity or intensity, “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
Classes
The social energy which maintains the class structure produces perverted culture in its three chief forms: mere upper-class culture, or ostentation, mere middle-class culture, or vulgarity, and mere lower-class culture, or squalor.
“Tentative Conclusion” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
But it would be wrong to forget that the average American does not think of the rich and poor as separate classes, but as lucky and unlucky branches of an undifferentiated society he does not even think of as middle-class.
“The Present Condition of the World” (1943), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
We have already got to the point where the phrase “leisure class” makes no sense. Perhaps our grandchildren will be living in a world in which the phrase “working class” makes even less sense.
“The Teacher’s Source of Authority” (1978), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Classic, Literary
The word “classic” as applied to a work of literature means primarily a work that refuses to go away, that remains confronting us until we do something about it, which means also doing something about ourselves.
“The Double Mirror” (1981), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
Masterpiece and classic don’t mean inherent formal qualities but a locus of social acceptance. Perhaps they emerge when acceptance becomes recognition, a vision of form irradiating it.
Entry, Notebook 54-8 (late 1972–77), 13, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (2004), CW, 15.
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