I think [Arthur] Koestler is increasingly forgotten because there has never been a time when the past has been such an unmapped mystery to the young and to the middle-aged. Hardly anyone now knows what she or he ought to know, ought to have read, ought to have seen. Around 1989, a great fog descended over the past, not just of human action, but of human thought. From Darkness at Noon, we have come to a world where a thick smog of unknowing lies all around us from first light till sunset. Yet we think we see clearly.
Two thoughts about this:
- Hitchens mentions with sadness many cultural productions, major and trivial, that were prominent in his childhood but are unknown by young people today. Is he aware that precisely the same lament could have been, and almost certainly was, made by people thirty or forty years older than him? And yet he does not feel deprived through his ignorance. Time passes.
- You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for.
