ABSTRACT
In The Ball and the Cross, G. K. Chesterton describes something about modernity which he detests because it involves a revolt against recognition that being oneself involves the acceptance of limitations and the following of moral laws. In describing this complex of feelings as something close to the heart of the modern world, Chesterton is no doubt right, and also right in implying that now it claims to find a justification in the theory of evolution in its various forms, biological, sociological, psychological. But it does not seem to be a thing peculiar to the modern world, nor by any causal necessity connected with modern science. Now this flight from identity is present in one famous modern use of the Metamorphoses, T. S. Eliot's note to line 218 of The Waste Land: Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.
