I keep finding so many amazing comments from E.M. Forster as I continue to read the fascinating new Wendy Moffat biography and cross read his writings.
His world view and concerns from the early 20th Century are often still scarily relevant to the challenges and issues of the 21st Century.
From E.M. Forster in 1938…
I do not believe in Belief. But this is an age of faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own.
Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp.
And this one, that I published in a blog a week or so ago, bears repeating:
Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and bies: school was the unhappiest time of my life, and the worst trick it played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible. From this platform of middle age, this throne of experience, this altar of wisdom, this scaffold of character, this beacon of hope, this threshold of decay, my last words to you are: “there’s a better time coming.”
In other words: It gets better.
Lost in the 21st Century 