SANFORD PINSKER
275
What's wrong with this picture? Well, nothing if you happen to fig–
ure that human connections aren't worth a fig and that what matters is
a blinking, never satisfied cursor. Adams rightly worried that the
dynamo would lead to dehumanization, but even he wasn't prescient
enough to realize how machine-like we would become. Here, one can
distinguish between those in the I930S, I940s, and I950S who took a
certain pleasure in announcing that they were "alienated" and the way
that subsequent generations passively accepted their dehumanized state.
Let me be more specific about this. I have always been affected by a sin–
gle line from Saul Bellow's first novel,
Dangling Man
(1944) , Describ–
ing a typical Chicago landscape, his protagonist suddenly pulls away
from his exercise in realism to ask the following question: "What in all
this speaks for man?" One might argue, as several critics in fact have,
that the central project in Bellow's work is the care and feeding of the
soul. He uses this loaded word without apology or embarrassment, for
it is the (often troubled) soul that makes us fully human. Is that enough
to put Bellow in the same camp as the Mont-Saint-Michel-loving
Adams? I suspect not, because Bellow has a grittier, more existential
sense of what matters in our human contract, and because he is not
likely to give himself over to the curious theology that pulses just
beneath Adams's ruminations. Still, reverence of a sort factors in to
what turned both men into important writers.
At this point, I find myself on the slippery slope that leads to gloomy
thoughts those of a certain age call "the end of civilization as we have
known it." Perhaps it is better,
wiser
if you will, to remember what
Amory Blaine, the protagonist of
F.
Scott Fitzgerald's
This Side of Par–
adise
(1920), said about time in the newly forming modern world :
"Modern life...no longer changes century by century, but year by year,
ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civiliza–
tions unified more closely with other civilizations, economic indepen–
dence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that
we've got to go very much faster." Granted, we do not continue to read
Fitzgerald's novel for its penetrating analyses of socialism or its "ideas"
in general, but rather for its uncanny way of putting a finger squarely
on the pulse of modern times.
Whatever stability was associated with a generation of out-of-it Vic–
torian parents had been forever shattered by the destabilizing effects of
World War
I.
As such, Fitzgerald spoke for "a new generation.. .grown
to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." To be
sure, this is the stuff of which romantic postures were then constructed
(Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald's Princeton classmate, famously called
