The Monthly Salon: October

Come and have your say

It’s that time of the month when I open the floor to my readers to talk about anything you would like to address. Maybe there’s something on your mind that you think the rest of us should know about. Maybe there’s something I’m missing in my writing, or something I’m wrong about, and you’d like to tell me. Or maybe you have strong opinions about Ernest Hemingway’s beret.

This is Ernest with his friends in Paris in the 1920s. Sometimes they are referred to as the ‘lost generation’: exiled and out-of-sorts after World War One, in a world changing faster than any of them could keep up with. Hemingway made quite a career out of that changing world of course - but then, in the end, he couldn’t keep up with himself either. All literary careers end in failure. Some just take longer than others.

Does it feel like the post-WWI era today or the era just before it? Probably historical comparisons are always silly. Here we are. Come and say something about the times, if you’d like to.

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While I’m here, you might be interested in this recent podcast conversation I took part in last week with Carlo Lancelloti, biographer of the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who I wrote about a while back here. We talked about how Del Noce might have understood these times, and about the wider project of modernity: the revolution that has replaced religion, and how it is playing out. I enjoyed it.