The first ape to use a tool — a stick or bone, perhaps — used it, no doubt, to kill or maim his fellow ape. We are no more civilized today than he. The history lesson to be learned from the rise of Hitler is not that he was sublimely evil in a way no […]
T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men and Sean Dempsey’s America, 2023 both confront the spiritual and moral decay of civilization, but they do so from opposite emotional poles. Eliot’s poem is elegiac: a whispered lament for a world hollowed out by inertia and disillusionment. His “stuffed men” drift without agency, trapped in the shadow between […]
