Modernity and Indigestion
"Modernity" regarded in the light of nutrition and digestion.
Sensitiveness is infinitely more acute (beneath moral vestments: the increase of pity), the abundance of different impressions is greater than ever. The cosmopolitanism of articles of diet, of literature, newspapers, forms, tastes, and even landscapes. The speed of this affluence is prestissimo; impressions are wiped out, and people instinctively guard against assimilating anything or against taking anything seriously and "digesting" it; the result is a weakening of the powers of digestion. There begin a sort of adaptation to this accumulation of impressions. Man unlearns the art of doing, and all he does is to react to stimuli coming from his environment. He spends his strength, partly in the process of assimilation, partly in defending himself, and again partly in responding to stimuli. Profound enfeeblement of spontaneity:—the historian, the critic, the analyst, the interpreter, the observer, the collector, the reader,—all reactive talents,—all science!
Artificial modification of one's own nature in order to make it resemble a "mirror"; one is interested, but only epidermally: this is systematic coolness, equilibrium, a steady low temperature, just beneath the thin surface on which warmth, movement, "storm," and undulations play.
Opposition of external mobility to a certain dead heaviness and fatigue.