“Lustfully, you consume the news, printed and broadcast,
of ax murderers, kidnapings, drug addiction, police beatings,
lynchings, stonings, riots, revolutions, battles, tortures, sodomies-
lustfully, to satisfy the part of you behind the wall, which must
be satisfied somehow. But this you never relate to yourself.
Should an example of it actually touch your life, you will
use your wall to mark off the example as an atrocious and
wanton blow of meaningless fate. You do not see it as an
ineluctable expression of the instincts you have said do
not exist. But you are Attila. You are Salome.
You are every man on every rack- every moaning and foaming
gobbet of flesh in history- every good impulse and also
every evil one. By denying the existence of the evil in you,
you have forced upon it an autonomous existence and it
has marched clear around the globe and it is ready
to consume you”. Philip Wylie.
Excerpt from “Generation of Vipers”,
published in 1942 by Rinehart & Company Inc.,
New York- Toronto.
Islander.