The combustion of the Present with the Past

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market of Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: that is civilization, and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of combining with the Past. Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places, and we need only a few bombs and some prisons to blot it out altogether.
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this the uncivilized have not forgiven them. One by one, the Golden Apples of the West are shaken from the tree.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 36