THE VOICE OF UNDER THIRTY IV
[Sufficient indication of the age and experience of the writer of this article is contained in the article itself.] I FEEL that these articles, in order to be a serious contribution to the columns of The Spectator, should be personal rather than general ; as they are to be anonymous I propose to be quite frank about myself and my point of view, not, I hope, egotistically, but as one chess player presents his problem to another. I shall not attempt to say whether I have anything in common with the Under Thirties that I do not have in common with the Over Thirties. At the end of the series it may be possible to decide whether the Under Thirties do or do not speak with one voice.
We surely are in a mess, all of us together ; Capitalists and Communists, Christians and Mahommedans, Over Thirties and Under Thirties. I, like many others, live in a perpetual nightmare of screaming Chinese children, of women praying in the streets of Guernica whilst German men shoot them down in the cause of German business, of the sunken cheeks of children playing in the dreary waste of a slum, of servility, of bullying, of thinly disguised slavery, of injustice, of hypocrisy that degrades us all, of materialism exalted not just to the right hand of God but to the throne itself.
The doctor said to me the other day, " What are you worrying about ? " I prevaricated, but he pressed me, and I said, " The international situation." " Do you have fears ? " he asked. " Fears ? " I thought of the monstrous horrors that suck my life of vitality and hope. 'More honey and cereals," said he. " You must put on more weight. And try to distract your mind from these fears."
Now I tell myself that I am just a psychological case and the fears are something to be laughed at. It hasn't worked very well yet. I could so easily distract my mind if it were not for the international situation. I could so gladly offer my services to those who attack the causes of war, the degrading inequality between men and the worship of wealth and social success. It may be that I am half-hearted ; that, if I am not afraid to struggle for these things then I should not stop aghast, and afraid that the disease has reached a dreadful climax, but rather the more urgent task should call forth from me more and not less energy and devotion.
Perhaps, at this moment, I should not try to assess the world in which I find myself—but time presses. I cannot, and I have tried to the end of my strength, escape the certainty that we who live now have got to face the wholesale destruction of man by man, the unloosing upon the world we know and love, however hardly it may have treated us, of the hounds of Hell.
I cry not only " What is the use ? " but " What can I do ? " ' I can say, as I have, that " I renounce War and I will never support or sanction another." I have no doubt in my own mind that that refusal is a right one, and I will not consider the consequences of it for myself or my husband or society. But I cannot—am I a gloomy pessimist ?—persuade myself that pacifism is going to stop the next war—which has already started. And I know that there is no easy way out of the mess. " I the Lord thy God am a jealous God and visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." Mankind has disobeyed the laws of the universe ; he has tried to " conquer " nature, blind to the fact that he is a part of nature and can only develop within its framework. The jealous God is compelled to see his children suffer the agonies of cancer, the inevitable result of the abuse of their bodies ; the selfishness and the greed that have become an integral part of our social, economic political life ; the misery and the degradation that follow from the substitution of " What will pay ? " for " What will make us all happy ? "
But I am not going to be content " to spit out all the butt-ends of my days." While I cannot look down that vista of years that leads to a patient unhurried life for either of us, I still, as I see the heroic lives of so many of my fellow-men, believe that mankind can repudiate this cruel and unnatural civilisation and find the path that will most surely lead towards Utopia. I want men to have the courage to say " This so-called civilisation we have so painstakingly built up is a monstrous thing. Most of it must go. We will keep the libraries and the swimming-pools and the theatres and the radio-stations, but we will have no more mass production of food, clothes, sentiment. We will not tolerate the existence of great industrial towns with their polluted air and their stony deserts. We will build a society that reveres every individual, that exists for the individual. We shall find adventure and glory in plenty in ' living up to our faith.' Let us work for the brotherhood of man concretely and seriously and let us publicly admit the ugliness of a divided world and unshared prosperity."
I should like to make some contribution to this end. I joined the Labour Party when I was sixteen but I felt in complete sympathy with the Communists' criticisms and so I joined them. But I was utterly miserable as a Communist, though for some time I ascribed my misery to the fact that I was a horrible bourgeois and not to the true fact, which was that I was not and could never be a materialist. Now I am a pacifist and I believe the faith of pacifism to be a real one. I am, however, finding it increasingly difficult to be satisfied with political work, and sometimes I wonder how far you can organise a faith. While I do not call myself a Christian, and recognise only the God that is the totality of the universe, I often speculate as to what Christ, who lived the wisest life of any man I have ever heard of, would have done today, and I cannot see him with a large political organisation round him. I look for the practical spirit of Christ, the submission to universal destiny, the working for all time and not for tangible results. I have had the great good fortune to meet some people who seem to me to be embodying this spirit in their lives. These people have reduced their lives to such simplicity that they can live qvite-independent of our economic system. One Of them, whO is very Unlikely to see these words, has expressed their philosophy of life. It is difficult to sum- marise and probably misleading. ' " Live in harmony with the laws of the universe' and you will be healthy in mind and body and creative citizens of an unpretentious society." These people are happy. ' They have no fears that burn up half their energies. They Eve, not here in England it is true, to serve the sick of mind and body—und they succeed where doctors and psychologists Tail: More and more I feel that this way is the way I must take whatever the sacrifice—yet I do love my nice clothes and showing my beautiful home off to my friends. I am still only reaching towards this solution. I am certain only that I can do no more political work, that my contribution to the progress of humanity must be a simpler one than membership of an organisation. And so I shall be content, believing that humanity can take the right path, to have the two children we both want and serve them with all I have.
This voice speaks for a bewildered and unheroic woman of 25, a woman who can only retain her faith, even, perhaps, her sanity, by obeying the simplest impulses of her body and spirit, who cannot attempt to build order in a chaotic world but believes that if she can herself live. an ordered life and be a true wife and a wise mother she will have made some contribution to the solution of vast problems.
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