The Lonely Dark

With the war, and most immediately in response to the atomic bomb, a mood of unchannelled despair had come to prevail in the advanced sections of culture; the young in particular were seized with the sense of having destinies already arranged for them, of being governed by governments in which they were unable to make themselves heard, and of being implicated in decisions in which they had no voice. It was this sense of fatedness, of having lost all freedom of social will, of social choice that shaped their lives. Diana Trilling