PIECE OF MY MIND

The warp of one man's thought runs through the woof of several essays on major elements of contemporary man's experience. The final piece, endearing in its parental portraits and pertinent in its portrayal of the author, who finds himself happy in the pursuit of an 18th Century existence in the mid-Twentieth, and who set forth in youth to know something about all the main departments of human activity, is the personal touchstone for the previous pieces. Reflections fall upon Religion, The United States, War, Europe, Russia, The Jews, Education, Science, Sex, The Author at Sixty. Mr. Wilson decides that war is the outcome of instinct, and exposes the crisis in literacy proved pathetically by a student who did not know whether he had read Dante in English in prose or poetry; prophesies the eclipse of romantic love and the advent of scientific amelioration of the species. His religious, political, cultural utterances reveal at the source the brilliant iconoclast whose audience is already assured. Most of the pieces appear for the first time; some, such as the 1925 dialogue between a zoologist as proponent of fathomed mysteries and progress and an iguana, happy to bask in the mystery and status quo of his iguanaverse, have been printed before.