RECALLING A MORE CIVILIZED TIME, AT LEAST FOR SOME

George F. Kennan, The Kennan Diaries, edited by Frank Costigliola (New York: Norton, 2014) (December 20, 1927: "Reading Die Buddenbrooks (Thomas Mann), this Forsyte Saga of old Lubeck, I cannot help but regret that I did not live fifty or a hundred years sooner. Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into an of them, and our arrivals and departures are no longer matters for emotional debauches, for they are too common. Similarly, we have too many friends to have any real friendships, too many books to know any of them well, and the quality of our impressions gives way to the quantity, so that life begins to seem like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off field of perception, gone before we have time to consider them," "I should like to have lived in the days when a visit was a matter of months, when political and social problems were regarded from simple standpoints called 'liberal' and 'conservative,' when foreign countries were still foreign, when a vast part of the world always bore the glamour of the great unknown, when there were still wars worth fighting and gods worth worshiping." Id. at 46-47. Reread this diary entry but place it in the context of our goolge-ized, youtube-ized, twitter-ized, facebook-ized, global media-ized, etc., twenty-first-century lives. Are we living lives, or merely existing, merely occupying time, space? It takes time to be and act civilized. And, in an age on instant gratification, obsessive self-love, and gross consumerism, we have no time to take time to be and act civilized. Also, see Fareed Zakaria, "'A Guest of My Time'," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/23/2014.).