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Science Fiction Fan, v. 2, issue 8, March 1938
Page 9
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FAN 9 Everything they say, everything they do, is a conscious effort to run away from practical work. The reason behind this is obvious. They are not awake to the vital problems of this day or the future. They are not men seeking even to go ahead under their own haphazard system, but chronic, anarchic negativists, full of ennui and welt-schmertz, terribly, tragically empty. Deathly afraid to face the real realities and seeking always to blur the sharp outlines of truth, as Stapledon wrote of them, with hollow outbursts of sound and fury. Shroyer—Sykora--Moskowitz—Speer and their satellites, they are all of the same cloth. Bored satiated with what little of life they have borne on their shoulders as "martyrs", they turn dulled glazy eyes on a world stirring with creative energies they themselves cannot feel or understand and belch vapid condemnations on the people actively working toward the saving of civilization. Weary of life before they have learned its meaning, cynically they want us to bury ourselves in escape, in wine, in some form of religion, in every pursuit that dulls the senses and serves but to put off for awhile the battle for sanity and a firm grasp on the fabric of the cosmos. Themselves a minus sign on the pages of history, they invite us to step over to their cozy, sheltered nook and have a few snorts of their witches brew of mental stagnation. It will be interesting, of course, to watch their peregrinations as immutable natural laws force a universal revulsion against barbarity and ignorance, bringing their ivory towers crashing down out of the clouds into the swaet muck of present-day reality. The way of life is struggle onward and upward, now and forever. We cannot escape from it by denial or suicide or in the warm depths of a woman's arms. It may be futility. We may all of us be the butt of some cosmic joke. But the universe itself proclaims, with the voice of the unknown crying out for revealment and liberation that this is not so....... JBM
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FAN 9 Everything they say, everything they do, is a conscious effort to run away from practical work. The reason behind this is obvious. They are not awake to the vital problems of this day or the future. They are not men seeking even to go ahead under their own haphazard system, but chronic, anarchic negativists, full of ennui and welt-schmertz, terribly, tragically empty. Deathly afraid to face the real realities and seeking always to blur the sharp outlines of truth, as Stapledon wrote of them, with hollow outbursts of sound and fury. Shroyer—Sykora--Moskowitz—Speer and their satellites, they are all of the same cloth. Bored satiated with what little of life they have borne on their shoulders as "martyrs", they turn dulled glazy eyes on a world stirring with creative energies they themselves cannot feel or understand and belch vapid condemnations on the people actively working toward the saving of civilization. Weary of life before they have learned its meaning, cynically they want us to bury ourselves in escape, in wine, in some form of religion, in every pursuit that dulls the senses and serves but to put off for awhile the battle for sanity and a firm grasp on the fabric of the cosmos. Themselves a minus sign on the pages of history, they invite us to step over to their cozy, sheltered nook and have a few snorts of their witches brew of mental stagnation. It will be interesting, of course, to watch their peregrinations as immutable natural laws force a universal revulsion against barbarity and ignorance, bringing their ivory towers crashing down out of the clouds into the swaet muck of present-day reality. The way of life is struggle onward and upward, now and forever. We cannot escape from it by denial or suicide or in the warm depths of a woman's arms. It may be futility. We may all of us be the butt of some cosmic joke. But the universe itself proclaims, with the voice of the unknown crying out for revealment and liberation that this is not so....... JBM
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