Diagnosis of Our Time
By: Nathan A. Scott JR.
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
— W. B. Yeats
In such an age, when all is in doubt and when, as Yeats says, "Things fall apart" and "the center cannot hold" — in such an age, the philosopher may not be utterly crippled, if he is willing to have his vocation confined to the analysis of nothing more than the structure of sentences; and the social critic can always be kept busy in notating the tics and the spasms that are the signs of our distress.
And in similar reduced ways the other custodians of the cultural life may in some manner continue to function when overtaken by a late bad time.
But when the traditional premises regarding the radical significance of things have collapsed and when there is no longer any robust common faith to orient the imaginative faculties of men with respect to the ultimate mysteries of existence — when, in other words, the basic presuppositions of a culture have become just yawning question marks, then the literary artist is thrust upon a most desolate frontier indeed…