Apocalypse Next Exit

The automobile, a mechanical termite, has in the last two decades eaten the American town, turning it into a rotten lace of trashy buildings. This maggot-flux of traffic is the pulse of history in our time, and it is the end of a world. Strange that no writer, no artist, no composer, no philosopher has noticed it! The American town no longer has an outside; we have all moved indoors like so many cave-dwellers. Medieval people were insiders too. Their streets were sewers. Ours are racetracks, bloody accidents, megaphones for spun tires, slammed brakes, the roar of motors. The great historical fact of the immediate past is therefore not that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon or that the century of total war has continued into its seventieth year or that the liberal philosophies of the nineteenth century have become the mandates for terrorism and totalitarianism, but that man has ruined his one design for a community.

Cultures are discontinuous. They are forms of civilization. Civilization is the only evolved condition of mankind and has no viable alternative of any popularity. Culture, which begins with growing grain, comes after civilization, and has an infinite variety of forms. Civilization is the simple fact of being tame rather than wild; it is the domestication first of man, then of the dog, then of the cat, then of the cow. Slavery is the domestication of men by men. As long as there was no way around slavery, we heard precious little about the morality of human beings domesticating human beings as if they were cattle. The machine, of course, has made it possible for man to forget altogether the fact of slavery, but history happens with such a ghostly slow motion, and cultures hold their ideals with such somnambulistic tenacity, that we shall be another century yet, at least, domesticating the machine and freeing mankind from its ingrained propensity to keep slaves.

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Guy Davenport

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The automobile, a mechanical termite, has in the last two decades eaten the American town, turning it into a rotten lace of trashy buildings. This maggot-flux of traffic is the pulse of history in our time, and it is the end of a world. Strange that no writer, no artist, no composer, no philosopher has noticed it! The American town no longer has an outside; we have all moved indoors like so many cave-dwellers. Medieval people were insiders too. Their streets were sewers. Ours are racetracks, bloody accidents, megaphones for spun tires, slammed brakes, the roar of motors. The great historical fact of the immediate past is therefore not that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon or that the century of total war has continued into its seventieth year or that the liberal philosophies of the nineteenth century have become the mandates for terrorism and totalitarianism, but that man has ruined his one design for a community.

Cultures are discontinuous. They are forms of civilization. Civilization is the only evolved condition of mankind and has no viable alternative of any popularity. Culture, which begins with growing grain, comes after civilization, and has an infinite variety of forms. Civilization is the simple fact of being tame rather than wild; it is the domestication first of man, then of the dog, then of the cat, then of the cow. Slavery is the domestication of men by men. As long as there was no way around slavery, we heard precious little about the morality of human beings domesticating human beings as if they were cattle. The machine, of course, has made it possible for man to forget altogether the fact of slavery, but history happens with such a ghostly slow motion, and cultures hold their ideals with such somnambulistic tenacity, that we shall be another century yet, at least, domesticating the machine and freeing mankind from its ingrained propensity to keep slaves.