Our Choice: Fight Evil? Or Strengthen Good?

“We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question, whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us, and we are haunted, all of us, by the threat that even if some madman does not destroy us all, by the threat that our children may be born deformed or mad.

We are living at one of the great turning points of history. In the last two decades, man has made an advance as revolutionary as when he first got off his belly and stood upright.Yesterday, we split the atom. We assaulted that colossal citadel of power, the tiny unit of the substance of the universe.

And because of this, the great dream and the great nightmare of centuries of human thought have taken flesh and walk beside us all, day and night. Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares, and this is no time to turn our backs on our chosen responsibilities, which is what we should be doing if we refused to share in the deep anxieties, terrors , and hopes of human beings everywhere.

What is the choice before us? It is not merely a question of preventing an evil, but of strengthening a vision of a good which may defeat evil.

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Doris Lessing  (1919-2013) was born in Iran to English parents, grew up in southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from the age of 5, left school at 14, working as a nursemaid, telephonist, and journalist before starting to write.  She is best known for The Golden Notebook (1962) and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 for her “epic of female experience.”

• Excerpt from: Lessing, Doris, “A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews,” Edited and introduced by Paul Schlueter, (Vintage Books, Random House, NY. 1975) p. 7.
• Full essay originally printed in “A Small Personal Voice,” Declaration (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957, pp 11-27.)