Wyndham Lewis

Who was Wyndham Lewis?

Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST. His novels include his pre-World War I-era novel Tarr, and The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, set in the afterworld. A fourth volume of The Human Age, The Trial of Man, was begun by Lewis but left in a fragmentary state at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes, Blasting and Bombardiering and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date.

Famous Quotes:

• I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.
• When we say science we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science, the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.
• A hundred things are done today in the divine name of Youth, that if they showed their true colors would be seen by rights to belong rather to old age.
• Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.
• Feminism was recognized by the average man as a conflict in which it was impossible for a man, as a chivalrous gentleman, as a respecter of the rights of little nations (like little Belgium), as a highly evolved citizen of a highly civilized community, to refuse the claim of this better half to self-determination.
• With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.
• All orthodox opinion -- that is, today, revolutionary opinion either of the pure or the impure variety -- is anti-man.
• In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of freedom, like a bastard brother of reform.
• Then we are assured by Sartre that owing to the final disappearance of God our liberty is absolute! At this the entire audience waves its hat or claps its hands. But this natural enthusiasm is turned abruptly into something much less buoyant when it is learnt that this liberty weighs us down immediately with tremendous responsibilities. We now have to take all God's worries on our shoulders --now that we are become men like gods. It is at this point that the Anxiety and Despondency begin, ending in utter despair.
• A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.