Our national myth

The American Adam is not an innocent — far from it. But he is a corrector of errors. He has, after its brief and creative role in the New England temper, all but abandoned even the metaphor of original sin. The notion that the human condition is, ontologically, one of ‘dis-grace’, that cruelty and social injustice are not mechanical defects but ‘primaries’ or ‘elementals’ in history, will seem to him defeatist mysticism. No less so the hunch that there are between tragic historicism, between the concept of ‘fallen man’ and the generation of the unageing monuments of intellect and of art, instrumental affinities. It may be that these monuments, born of autistic vision, are counterstatements to a world felt, known to be ‘fallen’. There is in eminent art and thought a manichaean rebellion. ‘A truth,’ taught Alain, the French maitre de pensée (itself a phrase significantly untranslatable), ‘is the refusal of a body.’ There can be no didactic sophistry more un-American, no ideal more alien to the pragmatic immanence of ‘the pursuit of happiness’.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 298