ancient hungers

At The Imaginative Conservative, Professor Birzer offers this quotation from Russell Kirk:

In a generation like ours, which has forgotten the natural law and has knelt to Leviathan, Antigone takes on a meaning little understood during the nineteenth century. . . . There exist in human nature, common to the Greeks of the fifth century and to us, certain constant qualities. Of these qualities, among the rising talents of every generation, are a longing for poetic imagery; a dim participating in the tragic view of life; and an aspiration after ethical insights. Antigone is a great drama because it is humane in the highest sense: that is, Antigone exemplifies the educational discipline called humanitas, the training of the ethical faculty through the understanding of powerful literature. Despite all the muddled positivism and pragmatism to which college students have been subjected since the age of five or six years, truth will demand a hearing now and again. The ancient hungers of the imagination are hard to deny. [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 36-37]

We should live in fear and trembling toward the "ancient hungers of the imagination," toward the full extent of the "humane in the highest sense." It is only indirectly that it is we who are hungry. Our generation is not prepared to participate in a genuine hunger for "the tragic view of life." Even (especially) Catholics find it difficult to say with Antigone that "It is the dead, / Not the living, who make the longest demands: / We die forever . . ." To say those words is one thing; it is another to train oneself to "go gentle" in that ethical way. Positivism and pragmatism are not choices for our generation. They are our ethical way. It is true that some are capable of being attentive to the truth that demands a hearing, but who can choose, like Antigone, to enact that demand, to be a moment of its appearance? Are even the greatest educators of humanitas capable of gouging out their eyes?

We have always been the recognizers, the pilgrim observers. How can we be asked to satisfy a hunger that goes beyond the verge of sense and dialogue? It is here that we have always encountered the nearness of the divine. It is here where we have been capable of belief. We preserve the tradition of the illative sense and we believe in the communion of saints. Isn't that enough? Is there really something wrong with our imaginative preference for Jane Austen? With a conservatism that is the natural ally of "the cleric, the unambitious family man, and the housewife"? Is it not the positivists and pragmatists who deserve to face the intrusion of Dostoevsky's "fantastic" realism?