I have no doubt that, if one had surveyed the denizens of, say, classical Athens in its Golden Age, Alexandria at the apex of Hellenistic civilization, China in the T'ang Dynasty, or Italy in the quattrocento, a sizable portion of the populace would have said: "The World is going to Hell in a handbasket." Or some variation thereof.
So, yes, the World is for ever in a state of decay when it comes to culture, morality, and basic human decency. It has always been thus. Still, certain human beings -- at every time and in every place -- will feel that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful have been submerged in a wave of decadence and thoughtlessness. But, as it turns out, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful always survive by a slender margin.
The Poseidonians forgot the Greek language
after so many centuries of mingling
with Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners.
The only thing surviving from their ancestors
was a Greek festival, with beautiful rites,
with lyres and flutes, contests and wreaths.
And it was their habit toward the festival's end
to tell each other about their ancient customs
and once again to speak Greek names
that only a few of them still recognized.
And so their festival always had a melancholy ending
because they remembered that they too were Greeks,
they too once upon a time were citizens of Magna Graecia;
and how low they'd fallen now, what they'd become,
living and speaking like barbarians,
cut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.
C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) in C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (Princeton University Press 1992).
Poseidonia, which is also known as Paestum (its later Latin name), is located on the Italian coast, south of Salerno. Three magnificent Greek temples remain on its site.
Cavafy includes the following epigraph to the poem:
"(We behave like) the Poseidonians in the Tyrrhenian Gulf, who although of Greek origin, became barbarized as Tyrrhenians or Romans and changed their speech and the customs of their ancestors. But they observe one Greek festival even to this day; during this they gather together and call up from memory their ancient names and customs, and then, lamenting loudly to each other and weeping, they go away."
C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard), Ibid. Cavafy identifies the source of the passage as "Athenaios [Athenaeus], Deipnosophistai, Book 14, 31A (632)."
Herbert Hughes-Stanton, "Welsh Hills near Barmouth" (1918)
And yet, even if this going-to-Hell-in-a-handbasket feeling is timeless, I cannot escape the sense -- as suggested by "Poseidonians" -- that something is uniquely missing in the "modern" age. There is an absence. There is a lack. Matthew Arnold's lines come to mind: "The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled." ("Dover Beach.") Arnold no doubt had Christianity in mind, but we should not limit ourselves: the gods have disappeared from the woods, the vales, the meadows, and the watery shores.
In his edition of Cavafy's Collected Poems, translator Daniel Mendelsohn suggests that it was Cavafy's reading of an essay by John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) which led him to his epigraph to "Poseidonians." C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (translated by Daniel Mendelsohn) (Alfred A. Knopf 2009), pages 523-524. Symonds includes the following translation of the passage in his essay:
"'We do the same,' said Aristoxenus in his Convivial Miscellanies, 'as the men of Poseidonia, who dwell on the Tyrrehenian Gulf. It befell them, having been at first true Hellenes, to be utterly barbarised, changing to Tyrrhenes or Romans, and altering their language, together with their customs. Yet they still observe one Hellenic festival, when they meet together and call to remembrance their old names and bygone institutions; and having lamented one to the other, and shed bitter tears, they afterwards depart to their own homes. Even thus a few of us also, now that our theatres have been barbarised, and this art of music has gone to ruin and vulgarity, meet together and remember what once music was.'"
John Addington Symonds, "Amalfi, Paestum, Capri," in Sketches and Studies in Italy (1879), page 13. Symonds cites "Athenaeus, xiv.632" as the source of his translation.
After quoting the passage, Symonds continues:
"This passage has a strange pathos, considering how it was penned, and how it has come down to us, tossed by the dark indifferent stream of time. The Aristoxenus, who wrote it, was a pupil of the Peripatetic School, born at Tarentum, and therefore familiar with the vicissitudes of Magna Graecia. The study of music was his chief preoccupation; and he used this episode in the agony of an enslaved Greek city, to point his own conservative disgust for innovations in an art of which we have no knowledge left. The works of Aristoxenus have perished, and the fragment I have quoted is imbedded in the gossip of Egyptian Athenaeus.
In this careless fashion has opened for us, as it were, a little window on a grief now buried in the oblivion of a hundred generations. After reading his words one May morning, beneath the pediment of Paestum's noblest ruin, I could not refrain from thinking that if the spirits of those captive Hellenes were to revisit their old habitations, they would change their note of wailing into a thin ghostly paean, when they found that Romans and Lucanians had passed away, that Christians and Saracens had left alike no trace behind, while the houses of their own dawn-facing deities were still abiding in the pride of immemorial strength.
Who knows whether buffalo-driver or bandit may not ere now have seen processions of these Poseidonian phantoms, bearing laurels and chaunting hymns on the spot where once they fell each on the other's neck to weep? Gathering his cloak around him and cowering closer to his fire of sticks, the night-watcher in those empty colonnades may have mistaken the Hellenic outlines of his shadowy visitants for fevered dreams, and the melody of their evanished music for the whistling of night winds or the cry of owls."
John Addington Symonds, Ibid, pages 13-14.
Herbert Hughes-Stanton, "Chateau Gaillard, Les Andelys" (1907)
At this juncture, a poem that has been posted here previously deserves a return visit.
That we've broken their statues,
that we've driven them out of their temples,
doesn't mean at all that the gods are dead.
O land of Ionia, they're still in love with you,
their souls still keep your memory.
When an August dawn wakes over you,
your atmosphere is potent with their life,
and sometimes a young ethereal figure,
indistinct, in rapid flight,
wings across your hills.
C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard), in C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems.
Cavafy does something lovely here: it is the gods, not the humans, who are bereft; it is the gods who mourn the loss of their beloved Ionia (and, by extension, the loss of the Ionian people).
Think of it: who would choose to disenchant their life and their world? Let me introduce you to the so-called Age of Enlightenment (also known as, believe it or not, the Age of Reason). And let me introduce you as well to your new gods: "Science" and "Progress."
Herbert Hughes-Stanton, "The Mill in the Valley" (1892)
A disenchanted world is a world without mystery. What could be more mysterious than the human soul? Will any of us go to the grave, or return to the dust, having solved that mystery?
An enchanted world is one in which the gods are every bit as mysterious as our souls. When they visit us, they do not claim to be the bearers of Truth. But they are humanly truthful.
When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.
Eight million Shinto deities
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us --
touch us and move on.
Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Hoyt Rogers), in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).
Herbert Hughes-Stantion, "Villeneuve les Avignon" (1921)