Here’s where I stand on this. First, every sentient human being knows the world is full of evils. Some people may deny it, but not many and not anyone worth listening to. Life is tragic and full of horrible events and conditions. My shopping list of horribles is quite likely different from yours and the next guy’s, but it’s not about denying the facts. I like reality sandwiches too. So how do we deal with that knowledge? Yes, we could retreat into an alternative universe based on rejection of the world as we find it. If that works for someone and really keeps him from getting depressed, I’m not against it. For most of us, though, it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t seem particularly moral. Nietzsche’s analysis of the problem of modern man has always been closest to my own heart: The gods have departed, and thus we must live bravely as humans, must make or do something in our own human terms. We must not complain or lament our sad lot or call upon assistance from other beings, whether supernatural ones like God or human ones like governments.

Maybe Eisenstein would say that the thing we have to do or make is something inside us. Agreed. It is that - but here again there’s that false choice between the inside and the outside, between engagement with the bad old corrupt world and withdrawal into some place of inner purity.

–I have these things on my mind lately because I have recently set for myself the project of reading the collected works of William Wordsworth. After reading about 400 pages of his verse I can say that his plight at the end of the 19th century was not unlike that of Mr. Eisenstein’s. Wordsworth was disaffected with English materialism, bellicosity, smugness, ugliness, industrialism, etc, and his hopes for the French Revolution had failed with the advent of the Terror and Napoleon. He didn’t know how he was going to make a living, and he had an illegimate child in France. For him the sovereign remedy for all this was a cultivation of his own sensibility in the midst of the unspoiled beauties of nature. He titled one of his major poems “The Recluse”. He was probably near to a breakdown in his early 20’s (something that his friend Coleridge wasn’t able to avoid, along with opium addiction). Beauty led him back to the human heart, as he would put it - to the lives of ordinary human beings. A poet, he said, is a man speaking to men.

Sounds good to me. We shouldn’t think our present problems are especially unique or awful. Old Wordsworth knew the score.

–These are maxims from hell, but hell is where most of us peons have aways lived throughout time and forever.