Who Will Survive in America!

It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.

Satire dominates letters in an age of decay and boredom. Very often it is the instrument of the old order, moral and social, against the triumphant and vulgar new order. For satire to have meaning, the vices of the ascendant forces in society must contrast forcibly with the accepted, or at least traditional, principles of morality. Even in the Rome of Petronius, a sufficient residue of taste and principle remained for the purposes of irony; even in the Enlightenment, sufficient sense of justice remained for Voltaire to make a mock of the age of phantasms and buckram masks. Mr. Wyndham Lewis argues that true satire cannot flourish in our time because men no longer repair to accepted standards of morality by which the monstrous and the ridiculous may be judged; and it seems true that satire wakes to life at a certain stage of social decay, but loses its power to move men after that decay has progressed yet further. Whether or not the work of these writers is true satire, at any rate they have turned their wit against the grand assumption of the men who advocate an equalitarian and collectivistic society, from their melioristic secularism to their notion of economic justice. The terrestrial paradise, Bellamy-style, seems to the leading writers of the time to be intolerably boring and base.