The ABC of Escapism

The keyword of our generation is "Life." The pathos of this will to live occasionally electrifies cafes and dance halls in the hysteria of an adolescent or middle-aged woman. By typography and photography the Press galvanizes its dead news to an artificial life. The educator no longer sells the corpse of knowledge with copy-book slogans like "Knowledge is power," but alike for adult and child baits the powder with the jam of "vital interest." A radio or a dance band resurrects from the dead our animal appetite for food. That our will to life is the drowning hope of a bankrupt age in despair, that is the diagnosis of our critics, and I for one do not deny its truth. But the bankruptcy of life is a bankruptcy of love. The Waste Land is our legacy from the nineteenth century humanists and humanitarians, who taught us to love our neighbour because we can only be certain of ourselves. How repulsive is that ingrown love with all the neuroses it breeds in us! And so, certain workers and certain bourgeois find that hate at least is healthy and primitive and radical in human nature. The nineteenth century did not, however understand the nature of love. Love desires something else; it wishes to explore and penetrate other things for their own sake. No man can lead a human life who rejects this interpretation: life is destitution itself if love has no way out to other things and other people. The human unit of grace and nature is disorganized and the heart indulges in orgies of self-pity to the detriment of the mind. The only exit from self is in sentimentality-love directed to the unreal

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