Was it unattainable

The late 1950’s and 1960’s were a massively turbulent period in the history Europe and perhaps the world. In the aftermath of Nazi terror people had become terribly disillusioned with humanity and its achievements. The anguish and hopelessness was extreme. The continent had seen two brutal wars. They both were unbelievably de humanizing to those directly involved in them and those who watched from a distance. The human mind had plummeted in to unforeseen depths and seemed to emerge as the most evil of all instruments of torture.

People had lost hope in the goodness of their race. They found no one to blame but themselves. No one had a clue about what was happening. Was this the humanity which produced Shakespeare and Newton and Einstein which was now unearthing evil at every turn? Was this the same society which spread to newer lands and intellectual territories now falling a victim of its own monsters?

This came as a surprise to many. There were no precedents to the brutality and total neglect to everything we held near to our core. No one knew what led to such a bizarre out come. The renaissance had introduced a new model of man, free vigorous and capable of taking on the world. The period became a giant leap in the history of man. Perhaps the seeds of decay were sown even when the revolution was on.

This new face of humanity did not fail to get reflected in art. Every value we held on dearly to, was mauled and made to look inane, our whole civilization had begun to appear as unreal and dirty. The artists and intellectuals in the post war period saw an unstable world, one in which nothing could be relied on. Our god had died and there was nothing to replace it with.

It was this extreme distrust in everything human and the sight of a fragmentary reality which produced geniuses like Samuel Becket, Eugene Ionesco and Rob Grillet in Europe. They perceived the death of man written all over the place and in the absence of anything else to rely on, decided to celebrate this in their works.

People like Jean Marie Domenach had often wondered how the finest specimens of the race could be the loudest detractors it. To me it does not seem surprising at all. The European mind was highly entrenched in materialism. It had thought that everything would be made clear once the sciences had got hold of reality. It refused to look deeper into it. The European thought centered on the social rather than the individual. There were no syntheses.

Once the social structure began to shake it could not turn to anywhere else. People like Domenach wanted to rebuild it and could not understand how sensitive individuals like Becket went the other way. In reality the disease was of the soul rather than of the mind. It could not have been remedied by material anti dotes. What these intellectuals saw was the inherent wickedness of reality.

Becket yearned for God to come to his rescue, but he was searching for him in a place the God could not be found, that is, on the out side. His disease of the soul did not find expression in searching for an answer on the inside. He realized that what he was witnessing was MAYA without realizing its real implications.

I was always able to empathize with the modernists (of all varieties) because of this inherent yearning and disillusionment that I found in them. My only complaint being that they did not take the quest further in to the inner realms. The answer for all the ills of the world lies on the inside, in the real nature of man.

I believe that their quest was for something attainable. It was unfortunate that they did not realize it.