Darkness at Dawn

In 15 years of journalism, 100 days awaiting execution in a Franco prison, six years of watching prewar Leftism crumble under the shock of totalitarian war, Hungarian-born Author Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon) has learned to lift himself above the battle. Last week in the New York Times, he wrote that the great events of today are only events in an "interregnum," that an age is dying. Said Koestler:

"The next decades will be a time of distress and of gnashing of teeth. We shall live in the hollow of the historial wave . . . [but] the day is not far when the present interregnum will end and a new horizontal ferment will arise ... an irresistible global mood, a spiritual springtide like early Christianity or the Renaissance. It will probably mark the end of our historical era, the period which began with Galileo, Newton and Columbus, the age of scientific formulation ... of the ascendance of reason over spirit. . . .

"As the frequency of the convulsions increases, the amplitude of their violence grows; the point of exhaustion has come within almost measurable range. There might be one or two more world wars but not a dozen. . . . Meanwhile [the] chief aim will be to create oases in the interregnum desert. ... In the so-called Dark Ages ... such oases assured the continuity of civilization: the monasteries first and later the universities ... on which no gendarme could set foot....

"We can discern in the past a succession of levels of social awareness, like an ascending staircase. The age of religious wars ended when secular politics began to dominate . . . feudal politics ended when economic factors assumed overriding importance; the struggles of economic man will end by the emergence of the new ethical values of the new age . . . the new movement will re-establish the disturbed balance between rational and spiritual values. . . .

"In 1917 Utopia seemed at hand. Today it is postponed for the duration of the interregnum. Let us plant oases."

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