A MORATORIUM ON THOUGHT.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 142, 18 June 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

A MORATORIUM ON THOUGHT.

Those who read the report of Mr. Benno Moiseiwitsch’s conversatioa with an interviewer in The Press last week may have been encouraged by his belief that even depressions have their uses; that a kind of intellectual renaissance will be the outcome oi these years of trial and suffering. Since Mr. Moiseiwitsch travels a widei world than can be seen from most New Zealand windows, his hope is not a sheltered one or of weakly growth. As it has had the more to survive, so it is the more to be trusted. Certainly the atmosphere of tho ten prosperous years following the Great War, when people were eagerly engaged in easy money making, was not of the kind to inspire great art. It is true also that many of the classical works of music and literature have been the producti of individual sorrow or a people’s oppression. But the search for an artistic awakening in the world of to-day must be sustained more by hope than by evidence of its existence. As Mr. Moiseiwitsch said, in a time of business depresson publishers cannot issue books or music as generously as they might; perhaps not an intolerable evil. But the misfortune is that the restriction operates largely and first upon those courageous and experimental writings which from their very nature are less sure of an audience. Yet to blame the publishers is almost as unfair as it is useless; for they have in the end no choice but to obey the demand of the public, which is still greedy for foolish and false or trivial work. Recent lists of best-selling books, as good evidence as any, contain little to show that the mind of the world is intensely active or even in a promising ferment. In fiction the tendency is to escape into a romantic and illusory past, while works other than fiction—outside the fields of economics and practical science—are scarcely more distinguished. The world can no doubt become too prosperous for its own cultural good; but the immediate reaction in years of adversity seems to be to seek palliatives, not to thrust on with the energy either of hope or of desperation. Thinking has always been an arduoui enterprise, to which most people, whei they have lost their mon<y, such distraction as they nwr ana n riding on what Miss Rebecca Wesl calls “The Great Tosh Horse” or in music freaked into violent animation with every sort of instrumental and rhythmical effect. That is the immediate reaction, though the future may tell a different and better story. In the meantime, with Mr. Moiaeiwitsch, “we have just to wait”—and need not fidget.—Press, Christchurch.