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.

Strange to the European

“London , for example, is periodically startled by some work in sculpture or painting which would have seemed a commonplace to Amenhotep III., or to a fifth-century Tartar Khan.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. V, p. 24.

For ensuring the true freedom

“I now believe, for instance, that people should be compelled to be freer and more ‘individualistic’ than they naturally desire to be, rather than that their native unfreedom and instinct towards slavery should be encouraged and organized. I believe they could with advantage be compelled to remain absolutely alone for several hours every day; and a week’s solitary confinement, under pleasant conditions (say in mountain scenery), every two months, would be an excellent provision.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, appendix, p. 121.

Bringing to life ghosts

“But there is nothing so ‘new’ and so startling as the Past, for most people. All the supreme novelties come from the most distant epochs; the more remote the more novel, of course. The ‘Future’, it is true, contains nothing but potential novelties. But they are not yet in existence, and so cannot be educed.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. VIII, p. 36.

The Objective of revolutions

“The present ‘revolution’ in art is not a revolt against tradition at all. It is a more concerted attempt, on a wider and subtler basis (provided by recent research and technical facilities), to revive a sense that had been almost totally lost, as the Salons and Academies witnessed.

The only art at present time about which there is any reason to employ the word ‘revolutionary’, or that sentimentalist cliché ‘rebel’, is either inferior and stupid, or else consciously political art. For art is, in reality, one of the things Revolutions are about, and cannot therefore itself be Revolution.” Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. V, p. 24.

Returns II

“All the most influential revolutions of sentiment or of ideologic formula to-day, in the world of science, sociology, psychology, are directed to some sort of return to the Past. The cult of the savage (and indirectly that of the Child) is a pointing backward to our human origins, either as individuals (when it takes the form of the child-cult) or as a race (when it takes the form of ‘the primitive’).” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. VIII, p. 36.

The actual matter revealed

“It is like a gigantic Victorian quilt or antimacassar. Or it is the voluminous curtain that fell, belated (with the alarming momentum of a ton or two of personally organized rubbish), upon the Victorian scene. So rich was its delivery, its pent-up outpouring so vehement, that will remain, eternally cathartic, a monument like a record diarhoea. No one who looks at it will ever want to look behind it. It is the sardonic catafalque of the Victorian world.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 92.

A critical engine

“But unlike social revolution, art is not dependent on fortuitous technical discoveries. It is a constant stronghold, rather, of the purest of human consciousness; as such it has nothing to ‘revolt’ against – except conditions where art does not exist, or where spurious and vulgar art triumphs.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. V, p. 23-24.

The cold body of the fish

“The amount of stuff - unorganized brute material – that the more active principle of drama has to wade through, under the circumstances, slows it down to the pace at which, inevitably, the sluggish tide of the author’s bric-a-brac passes the observer, at the saluting post, or in this case the reader. It is a suffocating, moeotic expanse of objects, all of them lifeless, the sewage of a Past twenty years old, all neatly arranged in a meticulous sequence.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 91.

Battered and deadened

“All idea of a true value – of any scale except for the pragmatic scale of hypnotism and hoax - is banished for ever from the life of the of the great majority of an advertising zone, such as any great modern city. They are now almost entirely incapable of anything except sensation; for to think is to be able to traverse the scale of values from the nadir to the zenith.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. II, p. 13.

An age is simply its instruments of research

“The political orthodoxy or new world-phase that is taking shape, whether for good or ill, has still immense forces to contend against and to manipulate. In the past, peoples the whole of whose mind has been bent to a practical end have not usually been very speculative or intellectually free. The man-of-action is not very speculative, usually, nor is he a ‘free intelligence’ as a rule, but an extremely narrow, unreflective, functional person. The Roman has left a little behind him compared with the Greek or the Chinese. So, on the same principle, how can an age, so bent on practical tasks as ours, be intellectually free or very speculative? It is only when a community is secure (and usually soon after, owing to its freedom and speculative licence, it begins to disintegrate, or else it takes a plunge or a series of plunges back into a self-defensive obscurantism) that it can become free and creative. And although there are great forces established in the world to-day, their power is very fluid and by no means secure; and they have no time for play.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book II, ch. II, p. 160.

The structure of human life is entirely transformed

“The average man is invited to slice his life into a series of one-day lives, regulated by the clock of fashion. The human being is no longer the unit. He becomes the containing frame for a generation or sequence of ephemerids, roughly organized into what he calls his ‘personality’. Or the highly organized human mind finds its natural organic unity degraded into a worm-like extension, composed of a segmented, equally-distributed, accentless life. Each segment, each fashion day (as a day of this new creature could be called) must be organically self-sufficing.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. II, p. 12.

What Marinetti named passéism

“The Fascist Revolution again, to revert to the political scene, is an imitation of antiquity. The fasces are the axes of the lectors; the roman salute is revived; and the Roman Empire is to be resuscitated, Mussolini continually announces. It is interesting to remember it did not begin that way, but in an exclusive glorification of the Present. For fascism is an adaptation, or prolongation, only, of futurism.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. VIII, p. 35-36.

The movement of the narrative

“The method that underlies Ulysses is known as the ‘telling from the inside’. As that description denotes, it is psychological. Carried out in the particular manner used in Ulysses, it lands the reader inside an Aladdin’s cave of incredible bric-a-brac in which a dense mass of dead stuff is collected, from 1901 toothpaste, a bar or two of Sweet Rosie O’Grady, to pre-nordic architecture. And immense nature-morte is the result. This ensues from confining the reader in a circumscribed psychological space into which several encyclopaedias have been emptied.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 91.