Uncle
ARMOUR, RICHARD
either case, we have sold our birthright as yea- and nay-sayers for a mess of airplane tickets and Skira reproductions. We are measuring out our prematurely old lives with espresso spoons. Secure in...
...Instead, we rejoice in our foundation grants or put another LP on the gramophone...
...With their talents, they are often in a position to dictate terms to the system, rather than accept them...
...The engineer and the chemist are wrestling with matter in varied forms, always trying and sometimes succeeding in creating something new...
...If the litterateurs who have spoken in The New Leader do not wish to come to terms with Things, there is ample plowing that can still be done in the garden of the human heart...
...The scientist is able to see it in binocular perspective...
...Physicists, biologists, engineers and architects all work with things...
...The media give the culture of the masses a pervasiveness that makes intellectual activity appear marginal...
...As a professional, it represents to him the possibility of tremendous discoveries in his field, although as a private person he may protest about the use of some of them...
...Architects are currently filling in the spaces between billboards and "cheap-and-dirty" with buildings well worth the inspection of a foreign, or even a domestic, intellectual...
...Secure in the uterine protection of the Middle West, many of us never know we have made a deal...
...While we plant gardens around our ranch homes, the clouds that water them also feed strontium-90 into our bones...
...And creation is as close as we can get in this world to the presence of the Absolute...
...Few would declare with certainty that we will have another 40 years of peace...
...Given the bankruptcy of liberalism, it is their continued concern with the needs of the group that has caused this particular variety of intellectual so much anguish...
...They are writers, editors and teachers, almost all litterateurs with an interest in salvation of and by the group...
...In making the possible real, we will perform acts of creation...
...While we store up treasures that rust can corrupt and thieves break through and steal, economists quietly talk of the possibility of depression, an experience we cannot even imagine...
...Yet, young Alexanders frustrated in searching for an all-purpose, economy-size, do-it-yourself Panacea would do well to junk their dreams of a deal for the Absolute...
...It is rare when an individual like Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama shows what one person can do, and she is well over 40...
...In either case, all of us must grope along with an awareness of the pit of Original Sin, but without the lantern of the Absolute to show us the way...
...The actuarial life expectancy of this generation is at least 40 years...
...The great debate on testing the H-bomb is an opportunity for the two great breeds of intellectual—the scientist and the humanist—to join forces in a battle which may become Armageddon...
...For them, America is the land of opportunity...
...Yet, we would be wise to ask: Who are these indecisive young men who have been soliloquizing in The New Leader, cursing the time that is out of joint and their inability to set it right...
...These writers do not rejoice that the times now leave them free to concentrate on the ageless conflicts of the human heart, nor do they wish to adapt themselves to our present age, the age of the Thing...
...The biologist has before him the challenge of finding the secret of life itself—not the Good Life, but the biological life, the sine qua non of existence...
...We must find our own issues, suited to the new environment that technology has quietly built around us, or return to a concern with the timeless troubles of the human heart...
...If it doesn't, there may be world enough and time for a novelist to write A Portrait of the Physicist as a Young Man...
...While novelists may deprecate the state of their art, aeronautical engineers can burn with a pure, gem-like flame in contemplating the state of theirs...
...To the horrified humanist or student of politics, the release of nuclear energy represents only a genie to be put back in the bottle...
...In closing our ears to the siren calls of the Absolute, we will free ourselves to start doing the possible...
...We have the peace that passeth into suburbia, untroubled by the soul-searching that can take place in the canyons of New York...
...In sweeping the dirt of our individual guilt under the wall-to-wall carpeting of corporation values, the younger generation has once more gone whoring after false gods...
...The aggrandizement of power in the hands of corporations and institutions threatens to squeeze the unattached individual into limbo...
...Mass communications are going morally bankrupt while waxing rich...
...The equilibrium of the cold war will not remain indefinitely...
...Literature is more worked upon than working, with the creative act often appreciated only as the necessary step in the generation of criticism...
...We endure, but not like Dilsey...
...The issues of yesteryear are where the veterans of yesteryear are—over the hill...
...If this sounds less than Utopian, it is...
...They feel left out because they are left out...
Vol. 40 • June 1957 • No. 26
