Passenger to Frankfurt

One mustn't refuse the unusual, if it is offered to one.

What a world it was nowadays, he thought. Everything used the whole time to arouse emotion. Discipline? Restraint? None of those things counted for anything any more. Nothing mattered but to feel.

But once people learn to love destruction for its own sake, evil leadership gets its chance.

Something is going on–something is brewing. Not just in one country. In quite a lot of countries. They’ve recruited a service of their own and the danger about that is that it’s a service of young people. And the kind of people who will go anywhere, do anything, unfortunately believe anything, and so long as they are promised a certain amount of pulling down, wrecking, throwing spanners in the works, then they think the cause must be a good one and that the world will be a different place. They’re not creative, that’s the trouble–only destructive. The creative young write poems, write books, probably compose music, paint pictures just as they always have done. They’ll be all right–But once people learn to love destruction for its own sake, evil leadership gets its chance.

All these Ministers insist on coming in and having kittens all over the place.

So many noble ideas flowing about. But then, you see, whom have you got to work out the ideas with? After all, only the same human beings you’ve always had. You can create a third world now, or so everyone thinks, but the third world will have the same people in it as the first world or the second world or whatever names you like to call things. And when you have the same human beings running things, they’ll run them the same way.

As for magistrates,’ said Monsieur Grosjean, ‘what has happened to our judicial authorities? The police–yes, they are loyal still, but the judiciary, they will not impose sentences, not on young men who are brought before them, young men who have destroyed property, government property, private property–every kind of property. And why not, one would like to know? I have been making inquiries lately. The Préfecture have suggested certain things to me. An increase is needed, they say, in the standard of living among judiciary authorities, especially in the provincial areas.

Does anybody care to look at history nowadays?’ ‘No. They’d much rather look forward to an unforeseeable future. Science was once going to be the answer to everything. Freudian beliefs and unrepressed sex would be the next answer to human misery. There’d be no more people with mental troubles. If anyone had said that mental homes would be even fuller as the result of shutting out repressions nobody would have believed him.

I suppose he will expect to be brought in at once. Under Secretaries are far more touchy than Secretaries of State,’ said Colonel Pikeaway gloomily. ‘All these Ministers insist on coming in and having kittens all over the place.

If one idea in particular seems attractive, and you feel you could do something with it, then you toss it around, play tricks with it, work it up, tone it down, and gradually get it into shape. Then, of course, you have to start writing it. That’s not nearly such fun–it becomes hard work. Alternatively, you can tuck it carefully away, in storage, for perhaps using in a year or two years’ time.