“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.“

Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937, Italian philosopher and political theorist. I love this: it is brief and full of meaning. We have lost our childish imaginings, many of them, anyway, in the last 150 years or so. The price, unhappily, is that many of us have also lost faith, hope and amazement. (And Gramsci didn’t see WWII, or Watergate, or 9-11, or reality TV. What do you think?