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Look at these, my child-bearing hipsThe year is 1992 and the singer-songwriter PJ Harvey is performing Sheela-Na-Gig, the most successful single from her critically acclaimed album Dry.
Look at these, my ruby red ruby lips...
Sheela-na-gig, Sheela-na-gig
You exhibitionist
The men of the middle ages, as we look back on them, appear to us half children and half giants. In the narrowness of their outlook, the smallness of the problems they faced, their fanciful and innocent superstition, their combination of qualities and activities which a reflective or critical society would find intolerably contradictory, they are children, and it is difficult for us to believe that human beings could be so simple. But in the solid magnitude of their achievements, their systems of law and philosophy, their creation and organization of huge nation-states, their incredible cathedrals, and above all their gradual forging of a civilized world out of a chaos of barbarism, they seem possessed by a tenacity and a vastness of purpose that we can only call gigantic. They seem to be tiny people doing colossal things.See also:
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The medieval mind feels itself surrounded, beyond the sphere of trial and danger, by a great peace, an infinite happiness. This feeling, so clear in the poets, is equally clear, to those who have eyes to see, in the illuminations of a missals and the detail of stonework, in the towers of Durham and the Vine window at Wells. But this happiness, characteristically present in the medieval modern. mind, is characteristically absent from the modern. And if our art, our religion, our philosophy, are dark with foreboding and comfortless in their message, this is not altogether unconnected with the fact that the medieval man could be happy because his church or guild told him what to do and could give him work that he liked; while the modern man is unhappy because he does not know what to do.
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