Life & Wisdom Quote by Basil Bunting

Bunting’s line feels like a cool instruction and a quiet rebuke: stop pretending the present is self-explanatory. “Collate” is the tell. He doesn’t say “remember” or “learn from” antiquity, verbs that flatter our moral ambition. He chooses a scholar’s verb, the workmanlike act of laying texts side by side, checking variants, noticing what changed and what stubbornly repeats. It’s a poet insisting that accuracy is an ethical stance.

The intent is partly method, partly temperament. Bunting came up through modernism, when the past wasn’t a museum but a toolkit: fragments, meters, histories to be re-cut into contemporary speech. That era distrusted grand narratives yet kept raiding antiquity for scale. In that context, “present conditions” aren’t simply politics or weather; they’re the whole atmosphere of living now, the assumptions we inhale without noticing. Antiquity becomes a pressure test. If our crises feel unprecedented, the comparison can puncture self-dramatization. If we congratulate ourselves on progress, it can expose what we’ve merely renamed.

The subtext is also anti-provincial. “Antiquity” isn’t nostalgia here; it’s a demand for proportion. Collation produces difference as much as continuity, and Bunting’s phrasing leaves room for both. The present may look less exceptional, or more fragile, once you set it beside older orders that rose, ossified, collapsed. The line works because it denies us the comfort of immediacy. It asks for distance, and in that distance, a clearer, colder kind of feeling.