New at IWP Books: Irwin Edman, 1939, Candle in the Dark: A Postcript to Despair.

“What brief candles of hope or of resource can we find in a darkness which we are first prepared to accept as absolute? What, amid the noisy alarms and scarring disillusions, can the mind remaining at once candid and liberal hope for?”

“It may seem strange to the point of perversity to declare in an almost immitigably tragic time that a vivid sense of the present is one of the best antidotes to despair. But the fact is, so great is the impact of events upon us, that we are losing the capacity to realize the present at all. Even in quiet times most people live for the most part at second-hand, by labels and clichés passing for experience. In tense periods such as that through which we are passing, we do not so much live as we are interrupted in living by dire intimations, by signals of death and darkness. We do not experience the present at all as a poet or any free spirit or, in a word, any person completely alive feels it. Each moment is filled with such complex uncertainty that we are losing the capacity to take or to feel the moment as it is in itself — now. Haunted habitually by the thought of how all goods are threatened, we no longer have the freedom of spirit to be wholly or wholeheartedly acquainted with such goods of life as even now there are, such goods of life as persist, whatever ardors and endurances face men. These we experience at their fullest in art and play, in friendship and affection, or in our work (if we happen to be lucky), and in all those activities which release and enhance the sense of being and, with it, the sense of joy.”