The Americans: The Democratic Experience by Daniel Boorstin

Author:Daniel Boorstin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: History
ISBN: 079530580X
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2002-10-17T10:00:00+00:00

PART SIX

Mass-Producing the Moment

“O mamma, come into the drawing-room; there is a man in there playing the piano with his hands!”

Quoted by John Philip Sousa in “The Menace of Mechanical Music”

AMONG THE NEWER FORMS of leveling in America, none was more remarkable than the changed meaning of the moment. The “fleeting moment” was the poet’s cliché because nothing was more obvious than that the instant now was never to be recaptured. Or, as John Donne put it:

Go, and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past years are,

Or who cleft the Devil’s foot.

Teach me to hear mermaids singing.

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