Alfred Kazin
FEAR OF THE AGE:
AN ESSAY IN CULTURAL CRITICISM
Art is a child of pain.
Stephen Crane
A despairing literature is a contradiction in terms.
Albert Camus
There are people for whom reading is nothing but a form
of relaxation and even a narcotic or escape. I wish I were one of
them, as of course I am one on occasion- say at three in the morn–
ing, when the real world is too much for my heart and mind and the
sleepless self wants, as they say, to escape. What I am going to talk
about is what I read and think about in the middle of the night,
when the external world is no longer a distraction from my real
thoughts and I recognize that the world is nowhere but in my "real
thoughts."
Let me begin with a poem from the nineteenth century- a cen–
tury in which literature was still the capital of discourse, a necessity
before specialization took over even for scientists like Darwin,
philosophers like Nietzsche and William James, doctors to the soul
like Freud. The poem is Matthew Arnold's early sonnet "To A
Friend" (1848), and the opening is one of the worst lines ever written
by a good poet. But since this opening asks the question that I shall
be asking, I have to quote it-
Who prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days, my mind?
The "bad days" to Arnold may have been the revolutionary out–
break of 1848.
I
think of them as life in the closing decades in the
twentieth century, when more than twenty towns in Missouri have
been poisoned by dioxin; when millions, being unemployed, have lost
their health insurance, are swiftly coming to the end of their unem–
ployment compensation, and hundreds of thousands among them have
in this freest and most buoyant of countries given up looking for
