I suppose these fantasy archaisms and interstellar revelations are no different

‘It’s not intellectually respectable, I know. It’s an archaism. All I have are these persistent intuitions.

This reliance on already-existing forms of identification - all those nationalisms and religions, with any number of archaisms ready to crawl out of the crypt - is what postmodernism has been.

That prose, in spite of or because of its archaisms, is good prose: exact, clear, powerful.

Observe also the archaism of putting the adjective last: “joy intolerable,” “song unpronounceable,” “glory unimaginable.”

the irruption of archaisms in the West's postmodern societies