The Enlightenment View Of Mankind

The Surrealists, And The Modern Movement In Painting As A Whole, Seemed To Offer A Key To The Strange Postwar World With Its Threat Of Nuclear War. The Dislocations And Ambiguities, In Cubism And Abstract Art As Well As The Surrealists, Reminded Me Of My Childhood In Shanghai.

I Don't Think Any Particular Painters Have Inspired Me, Except In A General Sense. It Was More A Matter Of Corroboration. The Visual Arts, From Manet Onwards, Seemed Far More Open To Change And Experiment Than The Novel, Though That's Only Partly The Fault Of The Writers. There's Something About The Novel That Resists Innovation.

Along With Our Passivity, We're Entering A Profoundly Masochistic Phase Everyone Is A Victim These Days, Of Parents, Doctors, Pharmaceutical Companies, Even Love Itself. And How Much We Enjoy It. Our Happiest Moments Are Spent Trying To Think Up New Varieties Of Victimhood.

It Was An Excess Of Fantasy That Killed The Old United States, The Whole Mickey Mouse And Marilyn Thing, The Most Brilliant Technologies Devoted To Trivia Like Instant Cameras And Space Spectaculars That Should Have Stayed In The Pages Of Science Fiction . . . Some Of The Last Presidents Of The U.s.a. Seemed To Have Been Recruited Straight From Disneyland.

For The Sake Of My Children And Grandchildren, I Hope That The Human Talent For Self-destruction Can Be Successfully Controlled, Or At Least Channelled Into Productive Forms, But I Doubt It. I Think We Are Moving Into Extremely Volatile And Dangerous Times, As Modern Electronic Technologies Give Mankind Almost Unlimited Powers To Play With Its Own Psychopathology As A Game.