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Many of the gifted intellectuals of that time took on a Leninist coloration. They were “hard.” To them “lives” and “personalities” were unreal bourgeois conceits, extensions of the idea of property.
What you invest your energy and enthusiasm in when you are young, you can never bring yourself to give up altogether.
Art, philosophy and the higher concerns of mankind are not the business of the state.
Do I seem here to be making a case against the intellectuals, criticizing even the way they read Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov? Well, yes—insofar as they allow tyranny to define the ground rules of existence. The tyrant tells us what true being is and how it should be judged. A scale of suffering is set up for us with the camps at the top and Western societies at the bottom. Those who undergo the most dreadful torments are “serious,” the rest of us are not worth bothering about.
Romantic enthusiasm (resistance to bourgeois existence) was largely discredited by the end of the nineteenth century. The twentieth inverted romanticism by substituting hate for love and nihilism for self-realization.
We never did understand the physiology that sustained us, but that was one of the mysteries of nature, an altogether natural ignorance. Now the mystery has become technical. Men, who have created it, should be capable of understanding it as well. A
Freud’s Wit and the Unconscious
The modern writer, when he portrays modern man, quickly learns that modern man has chosen to conceive himself as a compound of comical elements.
Flaubert’s Sentimental Education exhibits a perfection of language and a skill in every detail of the execution that underlines the rift between the wealth of artistic means and the poverty of the human material. The “best” writers of Flaubert’s century and of our own (Joyce, Eliot, et cetera) tell us that beauty continues to be made but that the obstacles to its making are very great and that the makers—and their small and shrinking public—are surrounded by a deepening nihilistic darkness.
We understand too well for comfort the contrasts between a consciousness swollen with the knowledge accumulated over decades of reading and reflection and the inadequacy of the company we have to keep—knowledge just ain’t power.
