Big thought for the day

Mitt's nomination day, which isn't really relevant.

This from a review by W.H. Auden in The New Republic in 1940, a forelooking that no SF or futuristic story I know of could match at the time, and whose fulfillment I see now as in a glass darkly, though it won't come in any recognizable form (maybe it HAS not recognizable form) till I'm long gone.  This is what I meant by by jokes about Totalitopia.

I am both more optimistic and more pessimistic than Mr. Daiches. I welcome the atomization of society and I look forward to a socialism based on it, to the day when the disintegration of tradition will be as final and universal for the masses as it is already for the artist, because it will be only when they fully realize their “aloneness” and accept it, that men will be able to achieve a real unity through a common recognition of their diversity, and only when they are conscious that all symbols are symbols and not life, that they will be able to use them properly to live and communicate with each other, and the river will have at least reached the ocean: but, on the other hand, though I believe that we are on the last lap of this particular race, I fear that the last lap is going to be the worst.

The review is of a book about current fiction by David Daiches, and the whole is of interest, and will clarify the cut I've made, which is the peroration. ANd think of it being thought in 1940!

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/tradition-and-value