Woolf prefigures Hitchens
Here’s Leonard in 1967 sounding a lot like comrade Christopher:
Communists, Roman Catholics, Rosicrucians, Adventists, and all those sects which ferociously maintain as divine or absolute truth, monopolistically revealed to them, an elaborate abracadabra of dogmas and fantasies, fill me with melancholy misery. The ruthlessness and the absurdity of true believers’ beliefs reduce me to despair. What is the point, one feels, of any political, social, scientific, or intellectual activity if civilized people in the twentieth century not only accept as divine truth the myths dreamed by Palestinian Jews two or three thousand years ago or by German Jews a hundred years ago, but also condemn to Hell, death, or Siberia those who disagree with them?
From Downhill all the Way: An Autobiography of the years 1919 to 1939 (Hogarth Press, 1967) by Leonard Woolf
January 19th, 2010 at 5:33 PM
[...] families tried to hide from posterity and Ken Burns.” . . . In 1967, Leonard Woolf was sounding a pre-Hitchens note. . . . I’ve been meaning to see An Education for a long time now. After reading Maud Newton’s [...]