The most succinct summation of Age of Anxiety I’ve found is Glyn Maxwell’s article in the ApGuardian, which begins by pairing a quote from T.S. Auden’s poetry, which until a few days ago was confined to anthology pieces like “September 1, 1939,” a poem he has disavowed. The same could be said about my knowledge of W.H. I’m glad to hear it’s by Leonard Bernstein, since 2018 is his centennial, and my connection with his music doesn’t go much beyond the songs from West Side Story. It’s an orchestral work from the 20th century featuring a pianist playing hard, fast, frenzied rhythms suggestive not of anxiety so much as of some counter-force, like the urban energy of a night club where dancers are frantically “tripping the light fantastic” to distract themselves from impending doom. Seven decades later I’m in the kitchen rinsing the dinner dishes and listening to WWFM on the Bose Wave when an announcer mentions “The Age of Anxiety.” He’s referring to the intriguing piece of music that was playing when I turned on the radio. Every morning it’s the same ordeal, with just a hint of the the addictive richness of false hope before the super-caffeinated reality hits you.īetween July 1944 and November 1946 when Auden was writing The Age of Anxiety (1947), his feelings about opening the Times every morning might have been expressed less politely, more in the tone of the poem’s prologue about the breaking down of “the historical process” in war-time when “everybody is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person” and “even the most prudent become worshippers of chance.” Every morning you feel small stirrings of hope that the taste will mellow down to something closer to the Obama latte flavor you fondly like to think it used to have. In mid-September 2018 opening the Times is like the first jarring swallow of a cup of gruesomely strong coffee you can’t stop drinking. One source of unpleasantness at that moment in history was Richard Nixon, who was into the before-the-fall fall of his second term. It’s never very pleasant in the morning to open The New York TimesĪ uden was speaking in the fall of 1972, a year before he died in Vienna on September 28, 1973.
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