Hey guys! This is my essay for Bard College, and I would really appreciate any feedback you might have. I'm a little worried it might be too short--it's only about 460 words. Let me know what you think. Thanks!
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Prompt: "One hundred years ago, in 1912, the Austrian writer and social critic Karl Kraus, famous for his provocative aphorisms, wrote "Civilization ends, since barbarians erupt from it." Write a short commentary on what you think this might mean from your perspective 100 years later, and whether it makes any sense."
"Fin de Siecle": The Birth of Progress
In the heart of Montmartre, a young man's fragile frame hugged the easel before him. With calloused palms and skin black with ink, he studied the couples' angles-crisp and acute when the metallic chill of her bracelet brushed his naked skin. The artist found a softness in the folds of her dress, crinkled and crimped, to contrast the boy's sharp wit. His thinning brushstrokes had stripped the pair of all the glamour of Paris, and left them in unabashed intimacy. Fascinated by the lights of gaudy cabarets, the artist made the reprobates of France his landscapes. But the critics did not take warmly to his bold recreations. They dubbed him a drunk, a degenerate, a social outcast, and deemed his paintings a disgrace to the art. Only a century later would society grant Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec the admiration he deserved as one of the most elegant and provocative artists of his time.
Much like the art critics of nineteenth century France, modern intellectuals often disregard their own culture's artists, poets and philosophers as primitive, debauched and even barbaric. Social analysts bemoan the apathy and crudity of today's youth, as yesterday's civilization approaches its demise. They drown themselves in nostalgia for an earlier time, an age which they have deemed the "good old days", and bitterly regret that culture simply "isn't what it used to be". But what many pundits fail to recognize is that, through the death of one society, another witnesses its birth. At the same time aphorist Karl Kraus lamented that "civilization ends since barbarians erupt from it", Joyce was penning "Dubliners" and Frank Lloyd Wright was designing Chicago's Midway Gardens. Blinded by the turmoil of World War I and fear for his own survival, Kraus, like many others, turned an eye to the pioneers of his era in hopes of preserving the familiar.
It is human nature to cling to tradition, to smother ourselves with reckless nostalgia, and to constantly criticize the novel and unconventional. But with these precedents comes the alternative-which is to say that is just as much human nature to push society's boundaries, to challenge the standards and chase progress. Those who adhere to the latter mark the pages of our history books. Regardless of how barbaric one generation considers the next, each era is remembered and revered for its outcasts and revolutionaries. Those deemed uncultured are often later regarded as the curators of culture-they are the Hemingways, the Feynmans, the Gaugins and the Wittgensteins. Like that of his peers and contemporaries, Toulouse-Lautrec's passionate eccentricity proved not only his biggest obstacle, but his greatest attribute. So as it seems, Kraus stands corrected. Civilization does not come to end because it breeds barbarians, but rather because it fosters visionaries, who seek endlessly to create a new one.
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Prompt: "One hundred years ago, in 1912, the Austrian writer and social critic Karl Kraus, famous for his provocative aphorisms, wrote "Civilization ends, since barbarians erupt from it." Write a short commentary on what you think this might mean from your perspective 100 years later, and whether it makes any sense."
"Fin de Siecle": The Birth of Progress
In the heart of Montmartre, a young man's fragile frame hugged the easel before him. With calloused palms and skin black with ink, he studied the couples' angles-crisp and acute when the metallic chill of her bracelet brushed his naked skin. The artist found a softness in the folds of her dress, crinkled and crimped, to contrast the boy's sharp wit. His thinning brushstrokes had stripped the pair of all the glamour of Paris, and left them in unabashed intimacy. Fascinated by the lights of gaudy cabarets, the artist made the reprobates of France his landscapes. But the critics did not take warmly to his bold recreations. They dubbed him a drunk, a degenerate, a social outcast, and deemed his paintings a disgrace to the art. Only a century later would society grant Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec the admiration he deserved as one of the most elegant and provocative artists of his time.
Much like the art critics of nineteenth century France, modern intellectuals often disregard their own culture's artists, poets and philosophers as primitive, debauched and even barbaric. Social analysts bemoan the apathy and crudity of today's youth, as yesterday's civilization approaches its demise. They drown themselves in nostalgia for an earlier time, an age which they have deemed the "good old days", and bitterly regret that culture simply "isn't what it used to be". But what many pundits fail to recognize is that, through the death of one society, another witnesses its birth. At the same time aphorist Karl Kraus lamented that "civilization ends since barbarians erupt from it", Joyce was penning "Dubliners" and Frank Lloyd Wright was designing Chicago's Midway Gardens. Blinded by the turmoil of World War I and fear for his own survival, Kraus, like many others, turned an eye to the pioneers of his era in hopes of preserving the familiar.
It is human nature to cling to tradition, to smother ourselves with reckless nostalgia, and to constantly criticize the novel and unconventional. But with these precedents comes the alternative-which is to say that is just as much human nature to push society's boundaries, to challenge the standards and chase progress. Those who adhere to the latter mark the pages of our history books. Regardless of how barbaric one generation considers the next, each era is remembered and revered for its outcasts and revolutionaries. Those deemed uncultured are often later regarded as the curators of culture-they are the Hemingways, the Feynmans, the Gaugins and the Wittgensteins. Like that of his peers and contemporaries, Toulouse-Lautrec's passionate eccentricity proved not only his biggest obstacle, but his greatest attribute. So as it seems, Kraus stands corrected. Civilization does not come to end because it breeds barbarians, but rather because it fosters visionaries, who seek endlessly to create a new one.
