Synopses & Reviews
Text extracted from opening pages of book: CANDLE IN THE DARK Q A Postscript to Despair BY IRWIN EDMAN New York THE VIKING PRESS 1939 Copyright 1939 by Irwin Edman Printed in V. S. A. by The Haddon Craftsmen Distributed in Canada by the Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd. First published in November 1939 TO J. B. GOLD in memory of days of peace in Little Codkam Hall A shipwrecked sailor on this coast bids you set sail, Full many a gallant skip ere we were lost weathered the gale. CANDLE IN THE DARK A POSTSCRIPT TO DESPAIR faiths by which men live are various, and some, like love, happiness, progress, and success, may hardly be recognized as faiths at all. But they are beliefs and men act on them. To sensitive human beings everywhere the most serious of casualties has already come. That casualty is the collapse of everything by which the hopeful spirit or the generous mind has lived. For the second time in a gen eration the brutal futility of war has broken out in the very heart of the civilized world, in lands that are the sources of ourselves and 9 1 10 ] our culture. Whatever be the causes, what ever the necessity, the fact that there could be such causes and such necessity h$ s al ready eaten like a canker into the bloom of every value we enjoy and every ideal we cherish. It has seemed to make a mockery of all our hopes, and nonsense of all our knowledge. It has turned the faith in edu cation into an irony and has reduced to triviality the arts on which men have lav ished their technical mastery and their lyric flame. It has made even private joys seem precarious and shame-faced. What do all these things avail, when they end in de liberate death and incalculable chaos? Men in thenineteenth century were sad that they could no longer believe in God. They are more deeply saddened now by the fact that they can no longer believe in man. What, in the face of such overwhelming collapse, is there for us to escape to or to cling to or to lean on? Where may we turn, 11 ] in A. E/ s wonderful phrases, from the poli tics of time to the politics of eternity'? What can we do to keep sane in a world gone mad? For it is impossible to ignore so univer sal a disaster. Even the Ivory Tower is not bomb-proof, nor can we retreat into our selves, for our deepest thoughts and senti ments are colored by a world catastrophe. Like it or not, we must think and we must feel about it. For once in our lives we are compelled to concern ourselves about issues larger than ourselves and about interests not immediately our own. So it comes about, strangely, at a time when action is most virulent, when condi tions are most violent in the world, that we are compelled to turn to thoughts appar 12] ently remote, to raise fundamental issues, and to ask fundamental questions. If all the goods of life are uncertain, we are harried into asking what the goods of life really are. If all our expectations have been defrauded, we are led to ask what the proper expecta tions of man may be. If our science is ren dered suspect because of the horror it produces or the happiness it has failed to produce, we are driven to consider the real hope and scope of science. If our education is futile, we necessarily ask what kind of education might not be. If our art is trivial, we must inquire what would constitute a major or healing art. In a time of despair we are driven to philosophy, which may, as somebody oncecalled it, be at least a dim candle over a dark abyss. Unless we are to go, like the continent of Europe, completely to pieces, we must turn to some organic and unifying consideration of life. In so turning we shall re-assess even our despair and pos