Permanent Things

The essays gathered in Permanent Things remind us that some of the twentieth century's most imaginative minds — G. K. Chesterton, T.S. Elliot, C.S Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh — were profoundly at odds with the secularist spirit of the age. They saw progressive enlightenment as ushering in, not a millennium of perfect freedom, but a Waste Land whose inhabitants can find refuge from their boredom and anomie only in the ceaseless acquisition of things or in the consoling illusions of pseudo religions — "distracted from distraction by distraction," as Eliot memorably put it.