Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1406

Notes for publicity material for Citadel, Market & Altar

April, 1942?

Original is in item 1404.

     Once in a blue moon (or longer) a book is written that sounds a new and clear note, points in new directions, opens new vistas, blazes a trail of thought. The book is strange, unexpected, unheralded; not in the current tradi­tion; rides on no scholastic coattails, no bandwagon; purveys no honey, no vitriol, no carrion; panders to no complacency.

     Here is a book. It deals with old things, old facts and materials, in a new way. It is a timely book, and the more so because it is timeless.

     Slightly forbidding and abstract in its first impres­sions, it draws by its sheer scientism and philosophic breadth [?] until oneself is found glowing with a feeling of discovery, as though the author had only guided the reader into new vantages of view and the seeing were all one’s own — the phenomenon of human life in its societal form seen warmly as one’s native nurture and yet in its process and procession dispassionately viewed as from a neutral star within range of its cosmic glow.

     And yet, one is bereft. What of men’s age-old habitual loyalties, fatuities and faiths ever being cast out from the temples of our dreams only to be re-in_______ (to our hearts) as benevolences while they enslave and enchain?