The Horror of Life [antikvár]

Preface We seem to be reconciled these days to the alienation of many artists and writers. We accept their posture as outsiders, expect from them forecasts of impending deluge, anticipate their nostalgia for the more virtuous past, and note their penchant for drastic solutions to those contemporary problems they are alleged to see or feel more acutely than the rest of us. We expect art to be a medium which denounces, forgetting that it has served to decorate and celebrate; and our guilt for having failed to erect that other Eden, when so many infallible theories have offered the hope, has often left us victims of the claim that the artist alone is competent to diagnose the health of society. Our distinguished writers between 1910 and 1930, the period called the second renaissance in American literature, who also dominated the literary scene for the next thirty years, had in common the conviction that America was a cultural wasteland. We had reached the machine age, something forced upon us by the vile greed of capitalists. It became fashionable to despise science and technology as incompatible with the humane and aristocratic values artists represented, and to despise the democracy which prized the humane uses of technology. The language of those recoiling from technology and capitalism was usually laced with radical political jargon which gave the impression of a profound concern for people, whereas the preoccupation with the supremacy of art over ordinary life with its plebeian concerns canceled out compassion. Indeed, the rightist and leftist solutions they were apt to espouse have converted much of the world into states little better than concentration camps: the more Utopian, the more tyrannical. The language of those hostile to technology also carried hints of paranoia: a conviction that philistines plotted to convert the world into a place uninhabitable for people of taste. The paranoid loses the ability to distinguish between real and imaginary threats, between real and imaginary grievances. Such myopia may account for the tendency of those critics of America, so certain that true merit was