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All ceremony depends on symbol; and all symbols have been vulgarized and made stale by the commercial conditions of our time…Of all these faded and falsified symbols, the most melancholy example is the ancient symbol of the flame. In every civilized age and country, it has been a natural thing to talk of some great festival on which “the town was illuminated.” There is no meaning nowadays in saying the town was illuminated…The whole town is illuminated already, but not for noble things. It is illuminated solely to insist on the immense importance of trivial and material things, blazoned from motives entirely mercenary…It has not destroyed the difference between light and darkness, but it has allowed the lesser light to put out the greater…Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our minds in a permanent darkness.
