Weber liked to observe that whereas the
peasants and lords of the middle ages could think of their life as a
well-trodden succession of stations, at the end of which, they would
know that they had passed through the entire breadth of what made for
a complete life. In the modern age, individuals have the freedom to
choose the course of their lives, but for that very reason, what
makes up a life becomes unavoidably a matter of choice. There is no
longer any standard that says yes, this is a complete life.
And so, the modern individual has an almost unlimited menu of
“meanings” to attempt to possess, but no matter how much they
achieve, there is always room to try to hold one more.
This suggests an extension: The power of
artistic form is to be able to have it both ways: it is freely
created thing, and yet it is
inscribed as a completed
thing. Its end is not a cutting off of what could have continued on
but marks out a full circuit.
Kind of a nice line of thought. Totally agnostic on whether it's right or not, though.
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