I have come to see the world as becoming more aggressive and tougher in its tone. This is not to say that the experience of earlier generations was easier or gentler, that there’s was a place more suited and sensitive to softer personalities. I mean tougher in more subtler ways, in the daily discourse from person to person in the way people communicate which I think is less caring than it might have been at one time. It is less considerate of the other person, more selfish and catering to the materialistic, the acquisitive, the competitive and assertive elements in human nature.

To use an analogy from the classics, it is rather as if the Romans have taken over from the Greeks; the warriors and systemizers have taken over from the thinkers and philosophers. Maybe this is one of these dynamics that swings pendulum-like from one era to the next. When it happened in classical times the Stoics and Cynics emerged, people whose sense of value didn’t lend itself to the aggression required to survive in the Roman world of conquest. These people retreated to live the inner life. It would not have been their first choice to do so but was forced upon them by circumstance. (The terms ‘stoical’ and ‘cynical’ survive to describe an attitude which is responding to something hard to bear or disapproved of.)

I think the present day shows similar indications. The intellectuals and refined types are nowhere, banished from the scene, left inappropriate to the moment. They are people whose time has come and gone and have to live dislocated, unable to participate properly, dissatisfied, disappointed and uneasy. It will be a while before the stage revolves once more to give them an audience once more.