Lost Classic by Garet Garrett
A Time is Born by Garet Garrett (1944), full text in PDF
A wish to live again in the past is very old. The future is unknown, the present is turmoil, but the past may be anything we like to think it was. We may perfect it by wistful imagination and live in it as in our dreams. Man has always had in him the myth of a golden age, a time to go back to, a yearning for return.All of this revolt against science, this fear of the machine, this notion that knowledge may be leading civilization to an abyss, may be and probably is referable to that ancient, infantile myth surviving unawares in the modern mentality. ...
If at last the human enigma does not blow himself off the earth he may come to a future such as he had not imagined, and, for all his folly, a future of his own making, knowing as he made it more than he could believe. It is a future that cannot be planned. No new world ever was planned.
Comments (3)
TokyoTom
Great! Thanks so much for putting this up!
I had not heard of Garrett, and although both the quote here and the work linked to seem very turgid and opaque, a little Googling shows that this guy - whom I had never heard of - wrote all kinds of great explanations about our slide into statism and empire.
I have downloaded a bunch of other works by his and essays about him, and what he had to say is very topical and resonates strongly today.
Thanks!
Published: February 2, 2007 6:58 AM
Wirkman
I own a nice hardback edition of this work, and it is one I would have trouble giving up. Garet Garrett wrote beautiful prose. The book is a little odd, in many ways, but still worth reading.
Truth is, though, he never wrote anything better than the essays in "The People's Pottage." Along with "The Man vs. The State," by Herbert Spencer, these were the best historical perspective essays by libertarian-minded writers until recent times.
Published: February 3, 2007 1:09 PM
Peter
Why doesn't mises.org run a BitTorrent tracker?
For others who prefer torrents, a few of the mises.org files are available on The Pirate Bay if you search for them.
Published: February 4, 2007 12:18 AM