Then the repression of poetry. «We live,» writes Dr Alexis Carrel, «in two different worlds, the world of facts and the world of symbols.» Now the world of facts has the sole freedom of the city. Modern man has lost the sense of the symbol; he has repressed the symbol in his unconscious. We are reduced to the study of his dreams in order to recover it. It was not always so. In the past, poetry, music, and mythology nourished his soul and contributed to its development not less than mathematics. They spoke to it in their own intuitive language, which science cannot speak. And the modern soul suffers despite the radio and the cinema, from artistic undernourishment. Art itself has abandoned the symbol in favor of realism. Certain painters operate purely with the reason and certain works of music imitate the sound of moving locomotives.

Modern man rejects the myths and symbols, because he sees them in a naïve and outworn explanation of the world. This is a modern preoccupation. Mythology evokes realities which logical thought will never be able to express, realities which bring to the spirit a nourishment which is singularly richer than the demonstrations of science.

«Jean Piaget,» writes Dr Ferrière, «has shown the considerable role that symbolism plays in the child. . . . People in the infancy of their culture make use of the symbols as much as or even more than children themselves.» If we reflect upon this hunger for symbols in the child, this yearning for poetry, we understand why it is that the modern school, which is directed wholly toward the world of facts (even in literature, which has become nothing more than philology), corresponds rather poorly to the child's real needs; and also very poorly to the needs of the masses of people who, though they are filled with popularized knowledge, have a secret nostalgia for that which would set their souls vibrating.

True, there are still poets and artists, but, like the philosophers, they stand outside of society. Poetry is relegated to the role of a means of diversion. Children are no longer told the legends that are filled with eternal truths; they are given «factual instruction» on how oil is extracted from the earth. Children are no longer required to learn poems by heart; they are taught the history of literature. And at night they read the poets, in secret. And yet man's need for the mysterious is so great that we are now seeing trashy symbols replacing the ancient symbols. We no longer speak of the Christmas angels singing to the wondering shepherds; we talk about Christmas trees and Santa Claus. And this humanity which believes that it has outgrown the age of naïve credulity swallows journals of astrology and acclaims the heroes of sport and dictators.

-- Paul Tournier