"The man who has not lost faith in the past is not frightened by the future, because he is sure that in the past he will find the tactic, the method, the course, by which he can sustain himself in the problematic tomorrow. The future is the horizon of problems, the past is the terra firma of methods, of the roads which we believe we have under our feet. Consider, my dear friend, the terrible situation of the man to whom the past, the stable, suddenly becomes problematical, suddenly becomes an abyss. Previously, danger appeared to lie only before him, in the hazardous future; now he finds it also behind his back and under his feet."
Ortega y Gasset, "In Search of Goethe from Within," (1932); in The Dehumanization of Art, and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton, 1968), p. 134.
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