What is perhaps less obvious is just why the leading writers of the ’twenties were predominantly pessimistic. Why always the sense of decadence, the skulls and cactuses, the yearning after lost faith and impossible civilisations? Was it not, after all, because these people were writing in an exceptionally comfortable epoch? It is just in such times that “cosmic despair” can flourish. People with empty bellies never despair of the universe, nor even think about the universe, for that matter. The whole period 1910–30 was a prosperous one, and even the war years were physically tolerable if one
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