There's More Than One Way to Crack a Modernist Egg

Take American author Jack London.

This adventurous gentleman, who had been an oyster pirate and a tramp, among other things,

all before the age of twentyÉ

Éthought modern conveniences had turned mankind into a bunch of wimps. Sissies. Pantywaists.

London's solution to the global wuss problem was to have everyone drop everything and head

into the wilderness. He figured people had forgotten how to survive without the aid of

air conditioning and toilet paper...

...not that he did a great job with the whole outdoorsy thing himself, seeing as how he

contracted scurvy during the Klondike Gold Rush.

The poet Ezra Pound didn't think life should revolve around surviving grizzly bear attacks.

While Pound would have agreed with London that the beauty of human life was connected

to some basic animal desireÉ

Éthis future fascist believed that mankind could only return to its apex by studying

the classic art of the ancient world...

...although Pound may not have been as interested in classic art as he let on.

After all, his favorite stories were about Dionysus<<die-oh-nigh-sis>>, who just so happens

to be the ancient Greek god of wine, sex, and a really good time.

Pound's good buddy T.S. Eliot bought into the whole Òclassic-art-can-make-us-betterÓ

thing.

However, unlike Pound, Eliot was pretty sure wine and sex weren't an integral part of humanity's

revitalization. He preferred a more spiritual approach to life.

In Eliot's opinion, most people were just too ignorant to realize how beautiful the

world was long ago...

...and the only way to get back to that beautiful world, Eliot thoughtÉ was to read about it.

Then there's the British novelist Aldous Huxley, whose masterpiece Brave New World describes

a terrible future for humanity. Is there a terminator apocalypse, complete with the Governator?

Nope.

Has nuclear armaggedon turned the world into a radioactive wasteland? Nuh-uh.

Is mankind plagued by Graboids? No.

The reason why Huxley's world is so awful is because people get absolutely everything

they want out of life. Anticlimactic, no? For Huxley, the problem with the modern world

wasn't that people were suffering and unhappy. It's that they weren't experiencing enough

suffering and unhappiness.

In his opinion, the human spirit couldn't thrive without a dunk in the Well of Despair

every now and again.

With mankind living it up with the help of dishwashers and antidepressants, the human

soul was doomed to wither like a dying flower. Doomed, we say. Doooooomed.

And that's what four of the titans of Modernism thought about the seeming crisis of the early

twentieth century.

While they may not have agreed on what exactly was wrong with the world, all four believed

that something was amiss and in need of fixing...

...although the wide variety of solutions they offered gives a whole new meaning to

the phrase, ÒThere's more than one way to crack an egg.Ó