I have suggested that the cultural health of Europe, including the cultural health of its component parts, is incompatible with extreme forms of both nationalism and internationalism. But the cause of that disease, which destroys the very soil in which culture has its roots, is not so much extreme ideas, and the fanaticism which they stimulate, as the relentless pressure of modern industrialism, setting the problems which the extreme ideas attempt to solve. Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.
—T. S. Eliot, 1944
To all of us, I believe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Roman Empire is like a mirror in which we see reflected the brutal, vulgar, powerful yet despairing image of our technological civilization, an imperium which now covers the entire globe, for all nations, capitalist, socialist, and communist, are united in their worship of mass, technique and temporal power. What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash but that . . . it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth or hope.
—W. H. Auden, 1952
1943
Jacques Maritain, age fifty-six, philosopher and theologian, is in Paris, embroiled in a heated dispute with his fellow Catholic Paul Claudel over Maritain’s support for the leftist rebels in the Spanish Civil War.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, age fifty, poet and editor, is in London. He continues his work for the publisher Faber & Faber; he signs up to serve as an air-raid warden in Kensington, where he has a flat.
Clive Staples Lewis, age forty, Fellow of Magadlen College, Oxford, is in Stratford-upon-Avon to give two lectures on Shakespeare, though the second is canceled after the news comes that Germany has invaded Poland.
Wystan Hugh Auden, age thirty-two, poet, having left his native England for New York earlier in the year, is in a trashy dive bar, Dizzy’s Club, in Manhattan.
Simone Weil, age thirty, thinker, is ill with pleurisy—she is often ill—and taking a kind of rest cure, with her parents, in the mountains near Nice.
