the web of being blindly wove...

                                             ..... he doth bear
  His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress
  Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
  All new successions to the forms they wear;
  Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight
  To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
  And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven’s light.

  The splendours of the firmament of time
  May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
  Like stars to their appointed height they climb
  And death is a low mist which cannot blot
  The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
  Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
  And love and life contend in it, for what
  Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.


The soft sky smiles,—the low wind whispers near;
 ’Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together
  That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
  That Beauty in which all things work and move,
  That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
  Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
  Which through the web of being blindly wove
  By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
  Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
  The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

  The breath whose might I have invoked in song
  Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
  Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
  Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
  The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!

αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν καὶ ὑπείροχον ἔμμεναι ἄλλων... Arendt, Johnson, mass society, & the ancient Greeks

Vita Activa; Hannah Arendt

This modern equality, based on the conformism inherent in

society and possible only because behavior has replaced action as

the foremost mode of human relationship, is in every respect different

from equality in antiquity, and notably in the Greek citystates.

To belong to the few "equals" (homoioi) meant to be permitted

to live among one's peers; but the public realm itself, the

polis, was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody

had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show

through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all

{aim aristeuein). 34 The public realm, in other words, was reserved

for individuality; it was the only place where men could show

who they really and inexchangeably were.

34. Aien aristeuein kai hypeirochm emmenai allon ("always to 

be the best and to rise above others") is the central concern of 

Homer's heroes (Iliad vi. 208), and Homer was "the educator of Hellas."

The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities,

problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior

of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not

only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it

has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the

two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and

the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a

life spent in the privacy of "one's own" (idion), outside the world

of the common, is "idiotic" by definition, or with the Romans to

whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of

the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose

beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though

hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar

manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period

prior to the modern age.

This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient

feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself,

was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of

something, and even of the highest and most human of man's

capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the

slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian

had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully

human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we

use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous

enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism.

However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is

at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the

ancients who considered its content a private matter-—as it is to

the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is

that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the

intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere

but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically

related.