Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The passion for freedom breeds the rage for order

From Jacques Barzun's An Essay on French Verse - For Readers of English Poetry:
The passion for freedom breeds the rage for order.

I have always been struck by the affiliation of these two seemingly contradictory goals. With order we achieve some degree of efficiency, freeing us to pursue that which truly engages us. Yet that very order is a small constraint on freedom and, if permitted, becomes the dictator. As long as order is the servant for freedom, all is well; but they remain odd colleagues.

No comments:

Post a Comment