THE NECROPOLIS OF IMAGES

“And, again, all the up-to-date, ‘modernist’ afflatus consists of catchwords, and is a system of parrot-cries, in the case of the crowd.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, appendix, p. 123.

Creative art is a spell, a talisman, an incantation

“The poet or philosopher in the non-religious Greek states occupied, we are told, much the same position as the priest or witch doctor or magician in a more religious or superstitious community. It was for that reason that a poet or philosopher was held responsible for his slightest or most casual utterance in the way that he was. He was recognized as the custodian of the spiritual consciousness of the race.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book II, ch. IV, p. 193.

The alleged progress in social life

“Here the progress implied is always a progress towards the shaking-off of a parental control or inherited religious compulsion; and in a tremendously wise, cool, insouciant, slangy and rather wicked state of ‘modern’ up-to-dateness, unashamed nakedness, sweet ‘scientific’ reasonableness, removing all veils, fig-leaves and fusty obstructions, a weakest-go-to-the-wall, healthy middle-class, animal Utopia is predicted. The modernist mother, with a perhaps ungraceful shoppiness, introduces her child of eight or ten to the chamber of horrors of sex with both pride and delight. The fact that she herself is the chamber of horrors out of which they have popped adds a piquancy to the demonstration.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, appendix, p. 125.

The smaller you are, the more remarkable

“I prefer the chaste wisdom of the Chinese or the Greek, to that hot, tawny brand of superlative fanaticism coming from the parched deserts of the Ancient East, with its ineradicable abstractness. I am for the physical world.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 113.

Overshadows

“My standpoint is that we are creatures of a certain kind, with no indication that a radical change is imminent; and that the most pretentious of our present prophets is unable to do more than promise ‘an eternity of intoxication’ to those who follow him into less physical, more ‘cosmic’ regions; proposals made with at least equal eloquence by contemporaries of Plato.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 112.

This peculiar spectacle

“So he collected like a cistern in his youth the last stagnant pumpings of Victorian Anglo-Irish life. This he held steadfastly intact for fifteen years or more – then when he was ripe, as it were, he discharged it, in a dense mass, to his eternal glory. That was Ulysses.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 93.