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Which brings us to a third secret of our age: many of us do not willingly live in our age at all. That may sound perverse to you, since we have no choice but to live where we were put. But it is very hard to take one's bearings while living in a perpetualmotion device, and the mind, our private mind, unable to catch up with or absorb all the matter hurled at it, often grasps a different ground entirely.
In reality, we live in several times at once, including yours. Perhaps because we have come to expect eruptive change as normal, we are less enthralled by it than we once were, and so choose an hour or an era in which we privately live irrespective of the insistent present. Modernism is committed to turmoil and revolution, but we have grown tired of the steady diet. The result is a sensibility that roves easily back into one's parents' more stately generation, and forward into the future where the imagination revels. Such range allows the mind a curious and salutary independence of time itself, which, in a world run by clocks, is a state of grace.
To that is connected a fourth secret of the age: more people are more comfortable with themselves in the 1980s than they have been in a very long time, or than they care to concede. The social revolutions that stormed for the rights of blacks, women and homosexuals, among others, in the 1960s, while not yet complete, have begun to be accepted as facts of our lives. In the 1980s it is O.K. to be divorced, O.K. to be a single parent, O.K. to be different. Slowly, mysteriously, Americans are learning to live according to inner judgments. We are learning to profit from history: rejecting crusaders and romantic ideologies, widening the middle ground.
Freud, Marx and Einstein, raiders of thought and institutions at the outset of our century, are beginning to fade as influences on conduct. The relative universe of which Einstein brought news no longer frightens people into a sense of personal powerlessness. Marx has been discredited in public as the prophet of a future that works only at the expense of human self-regard. Freud one either takes or leaves: your age may think him a brilliant curiosity, an alchemist with style. In different ways, all three helped to persuade several generations that fate either was not in their hands or existed only in the form of a collective. Now, suddenly, you will find intellectuals paying lip service to powerlessness as a sort of homage to an old complaint, yet under the skin they feel individual responsibility again.
This change is a real revolution, but it is being accomplished noiselessly. All the obvious disadvantages of a mechanized society aside, the fact is that some of our more recent machines have allowed people to publish their own books, to produce their own films, to accept their own diversity. More significantly, they are encouraged to do those things. Eventually we will need to establish a new unity of thought, if our nation is to progress into yours with some improvement. For the moment, however, the effects of regaining individual responsibility are liberalizing, even though it is said that we live in severely conservative times.