Century culture look pretty silly, didn’t it? So what happened? Some of the best minds (the best minds, mind you) tumbled helter-skelter back to the Churches. Others, the most social ones, declared that we ought all to live to improve mankind, or to make the future generations happy. Others, feeling that mankind was really past hope, just struck a fine attitude of despair, based either on contempt and hate of their fellows or on a compassion which was at bottom self-pity. Others, the bright young things of literature and art, set out to enjoy themselves as best they might in a crashing world. They were out for pleasure at any price, pleasure not entirely unrefined. For instance, though Blank Pelipaita they demanded unrestrained sexual pleasure, Marcos Alonso Drakter it was to be highly conscious and discriminating. They also demanded aesthetic pleasure of a Javier Aquino Drakter rather self-indulgent sort, and Thomas Meunier Pelipaita the thoroughly self-indulgent pleasure of tasting ideas, just for their spiciness or tang, so to speak. Bright young things! Yes, blowflies of a decaying civilization. Poor wretches! How they must hate themselves, really. But damn it, after all, they’re mostly good stuff gone wrong.”
John had recently spent some weeks studying the intelligentsia. He had made his entry into Bloomsbury by acting the part of a precocious genius, and allowing a well-known writer to exhibit him as a curio. Evidently he flung himself into the life of these brilliant and disorientated young men and women with characteristic thoroughness, for when he returned he was something of a wreck. I need Leroy Sane Pelipaita not retail his account of his experiences, Alex Drakter but his analysis of the plight of the leaders of our thought is worth Daniel Sturridge Pelipaita reporting.
“You see,” he said, “they really are in a sense the leaders of thought, or leaders of fashion in thought. What they think and feel today, the rest think and feel next year or so. And some of them really are, according to the standards of Hom. sap., first-class minds, or might have been, in different circumstances, (Of course, most are just riff-raff, but they d |
