What if Jean-Paul Sartre had a point? No, no, not that “hell is other people,” the most famous line from his 1944 play, No Exit. That phrase conveys the kind of romantic cynicism that appeals to late-career lawyers, recently dumped undergraduates, and flunked-out philosophy PhDs looking for smart stuff to slap on mugs and T-shirts. I'm thinking of his far more insightful reading of William Faulkner's fiction: “As to Faulkner's heroes, they never look ahead. They face backwards as the car carries them along.” There's a self-evidently doomed quality to this retrograde glance, and Sartre's analogy offers a very good way of understanding the plight of modern-day people—in The Sound and the Fury and elsewhere—who affix themselves to a deep and distant history.
Just as hell isn't other people, we aren't role-playing characters from William Faulkner novels (which is a good thing, for lots of reasons). But there's a great temptation to behave along such lines, especially for well-read religious conservatives. Such is the temptation inherent to Alan Jacobs's new book, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis.
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