ABSTRACT
All Men desire knowledge; but not the knowledge explosion. Knowledge may always have had a “mortal taste” yet it used to contain the promise of a better position in the scale of being and a surer sense of one’s true or effective identity. There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. Critics are right to worry about the proper relation of ideas (explanations, truths, beliefs) to art. Art history presupposes that creation comes out of a “chaos of forms” rather than simply out of chaos or miraculously out of nothing. In the 1930’s Ernst Robert Curtius began the studies that led to European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948). Faulty or not, Curtius’s great commonplace book is the protest of Mnemosyne against Germania.
