The alienation of modern man has resulted on the natural level, because these three are not one. Myself is not Myself, but is an Other. Estranged from his past, uprooted from the land of his fathers, cut away from his origins, modern man is largely a stranger lost in a wilderness of pavements. He lacks a Grizzlebeard. He has not that bond of family of which T. S. Eliot speaks: “A bond which embraces ... piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote.”[10] Abstracted from the actual existence of things by a science intent on constructing its own universe, he has been told that the Sailor in him, the man “of the five senses,” is a naive realist who is duped by appearances that are not what they seem to be. Existence can be for him only Nothing, and this last alienation clothes Guilt with the dignity of a philosophical category. Existentialist man, modern man as mirrored by Sartre and Camus, is the final broken man. The alienation of the Poet is probably the most terrible of the lot: told that he must construct his own universe by a criticism and an aesthetics rotten with Idealism, he labours under the impossible burden of aping God, and ends frequently enough by playing the Devil. That is why a man must exorcise the Poet in himself and turn to a life of action as in Rimbaud, or to a life dedicated to the ideals of an outmoded Enlightenment as in Thomas Mann. Mann’s Tonio Kröger is told by Lisawetta Iwanowna that his guilt stems from the fact that as an artist he is alienated from conventional society. Adrian Leverkühn keeps his art only at the price of selling his soul to Satan. Conrad’s Heyst, faced with self-betrayal to a philosophy of aloofment from existence, can do nothing but effect the final alienation: suicide. Sartre’s heroes, all damned quarter-men, quiver viscously in closed places without exit. The modern intellectual seems driven to carve the human form into pieces, and then to worship in trembling the suffering he has himself caused. Thus vigour has departed from art, and evil itself is given over to clinical weariness. Literary reputations are gained in proportion to one’s “sin mystique,” and one would think, contrary to the express words of Saint Paul, that conversion to Christ must follow on a season in hell. Suffering is the fashion, and a well-turned cross is one’s ticket of admission to a literati that makes capital of the Crucifixion. It is the contemporary version of the thirty pieces of silver.