For a New Center of Creativity

...It should be noted, however, that the elders, whose maturation occurred in prior decades, have nothing left either of their vaunted dedication and commitment...

...If the new creativity envisaged is to surpass the cultural mediocrity we currently enjoy, it must locate a new center, not revive an old one...

...Presumably authenticity of address—when the living man speaks with the living man—is what Plato seeks...

...For want of a more muted phrase, I should acknowledge that I am captive of the "religious revival...

...Literature is no longer confused with life, and the activities of the mind, valued in the Thirties, seem no longer viable...

...Creativity in and for itself holds no particular promise...

...It is true that the safe way to react to the meaningless is to take no position, to stand off and look on, to be uninvolved...

...Podhoretz, as a midnight swim in the Plaza fountain...

...Podhoretz, though he is a member of my generation, writes from the perspective of that disenchanted generation whose lot, with all its sufferings, he wishes he had shared...

...The present disenchantment has certainly resulted in the implicit condemnation of politics as folly...

...I do not deny that his perceptions are acute, that he has summarized with unconcealed admiration the passionate involvement of the Thirties, and described with irony the degagement of the present generation...

...intellectuals-those currently 21 to 31 years old...

...Fitzgerald's midnight excess served a particular kind of creative temperament...

...This is the safe way, but it is a deceptive safety...

...One would have to talk little to the right people to learn that the development of design and architecture is being made possible primarily by the younger generation...

...Podhoretz does not tell us what philosophers, theologians or essayists—other than literary critics—are doing in either generation...

...Podhoretz's analysis...

...Last week, Wallace Markfield continued the discussion with his "Children of the Fattening '50s...

...It is quite true that my generation (if I can speak for my friends) are uninterested in politics...

...I am neither a fiction writer nor a poet (Mr...

...It seems to me that my models are different—pious fools, errant saints, heretics...

...The dimension which my own work has tended to emphasize is of a rather different order...

...I fear Mr...

...he is also completing another work, The Modern Jewish Mind, for Harcourt, Brace & Co...

...Such intellectuals are by and large, between positions—an indefinitely vast-no-man's-land—betrayed by one ideology and reluctant to venture in search of another...

...Podhoretz, whether the model demonstration of human commitment would consist in such gestures...

...Neither the community of the alienated and dispossessed nor the community of the secure bourgeoisie any longer exists...

...The disappearance of a shared center, however one understands that center, is the real isue...

...It must be creativity addressed to the call of the hour...

...Does one imagine that the dispassion of the younger generation, its willingness to consider ideas but not to assume them, affords them any particular joy or satisfaction...

...The process of learning through which my generation must undoubtedly pass would not consist in a regression to any past model of literary demeanor...

...The written word, and the man whose wisdom is reckoned by his writing, is perishable—not for the fact that the written does not communicate, but for the fact that the word, not the living man, speaks...

...Podhoretz discerns between the generation of the Thirties and the younger generation of today, I would prefer to be identified with neither...

...Here it is taken up by Arthur Cohen, director of Meridian Books, whose study, Martin Buber, will be published later this year...

...He found that its growth in an atmosphere of intellectual revisionism—which revered the "solid citizen"—was its most crucial experience...

...Nor is the break-out into the ritual binge the purgation I would seek...

...Should I mention the models...

...What Plato discerns is that only when living men speak aloud and think together and recall what is in their minds and hearts to speak is the true word spoken...

...The religious position is suspect to many serious intellectuals—primarily those who -ur\i\cd Communism and have the sears to show it...

...The fundamental problem of the younger and older generation is not illumined, I believe, by Mr...

...What lies beneath such exploration is perhaps a tentative approach to the question of the meaningless...

...I feel the new center will be religious, that more than one writer will discover a greater folly or a greater truth than is now current: "Deus absconditus, sed non ignoti...

...How many are the novels presumably justified by the statement that it expresses the author's view of the world and if one doesn't share that view it is impossible to understand the novel...

...The ideal of an engaged individualism is not only to be concretized by abandon...

...It strikes me that their pose of disinterest is not willingly assumed, but is held by default of an explicit alternative...

...I may be wrong, but my guess is that Marxism, liberalism or social activism involved a much subtler and defining metaphysical view which, however incomplete and degrading, constituted a center through which to focus, not only great ideological commitments, but simple and trivial experience (what friends one chose, how one furnished an apartment, ate or dressed, etc...

...I would readily grant that the intensity of the Thirties has disappeared, that the younger generation (though admittedly intelligent) has little of the dedication and commitment of its immediate elders...

...Let us say Jehuda Halevi, Nicolas of Cusa, the Besht, Jacob Boehme, Leon Chestov—older names who have no apparent stake in the political order, but who, foolish as they were, believed in a position that might have transformed it...

...quite the contrary, I agree completely...

...evidently evocative for Mr...

...The real anguish (which I am reluctant to attribute to the atom bomb and the cold war) is meaninglessness...

...I have no quarrel with the fundamentals of Mr...

...I have no such nostalgia...

...While the present generation of conformity spawns its numbers uncreatively, other forces are at work...

...The call is not merely the reverberation through the windy halls of time of the shouts and cries of the Thirties...

...He found, too, that the generation's literary work was marked by the smugness of detachment, but hoped that this would begin to change...

...I would question, and it is here that I take serious issue with Mr...

...another temperament might be equnllv assuaged by rising at midnight to mourn a lost history or anticipate a history to be born...

...Podhoretz's behavioral portrait...

...The hope is not, it seems to me, that the dull repression of our generation will give way to some vital creativity a decade or so from now...

...I always remember with pleasure Plato's rather vigorous condemnation of writing in the Phaedrus...

...If we are to consider exhaustive the marks of distinction which Mr...

...Unhappily, I would suppose that I am a "religious thinker"—if one means by such that my primary intuitions are religious, ATOMIC MUSHROOM: NOT THE REAL ISSUE my primary wisdom is buried in an arcane and relatively unconsulted literature, and m\ primary passion is to assess and reopen the possibilities of religious communication...

...An insufficient number of that generation have influenced me or won my admiration to sustain nostalgia...

...Each facet of society shows the marks of corrosion—the desiccation of warmth, the disappearance of common language, values, tradition, the retreat into isolation and silence...

...It is interesting that writers always assume that the measure of a generation is the relative vitality of the written word, that death is signaled by the perishing of verbal tradition and rebirth noted in its revival...

...The awareness which theologians such as Paul Tillich have evidenced in the arts (and not the novel or poem) bespeaks the recognition that, however the peril of our world, significant means of considering form and space are being explored...

...Perhaps the cold war affects them and the atom bomb terrorizes them, perhaps State Department stupidity nauseates them, but, withal, the terror and nausea pass...

...The obvious defect of our times—it doesn't matter which generation one addresses—is the disappearance of communication...

...However it be, their way is certainly not mine...