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Summing up the 'doctrine of antiquity' in a sentence, Benjamin writes: 'They alone shall possess the earth who live from the powers of the cosmos.' He continues: the exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a portent of what was to come. The ancients' intercourse with the cosmos had been very different: the ecstatic trance. ( . . . ) It is the dangerous error of modern man to regard this experience as unimportant and unavoidable, and to consign it to the individual as thè poetic experience of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war ( . . . ) Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology. But because the lust
Paragraph – Edinburgh University Press
Published: Mar 1, 1991
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