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There's More Than One Way to Crack a Modernist Egg, a la Shmoop.

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The Modernists weren't optimistic people. The works they produced tended to be dark

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and depressing.

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However, just because the Modernists weren't full of sunshine and rainbows, doesn't mean

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they lacked for suggestions on how to make things better.

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Take American author Jack London.

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This adventurous gentleman, who had been an oyster pirate and a tramp, among other things,

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all before the age of twentyÉ

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Éthought modern conveniences had turned mankind into a bunch of wimps. Sissies. Pantywaists.

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London's solution to the global wuss problem was to have everyone drop everything and head

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into the wilderness. He figured people had forgotten how to survive without the aid of

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air conditioning and toilet paper...

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...not that he did a great job with the whole outdoorsy thing himself, seeing as how he

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contracted scurvy during the Klondike Gold Rush.

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The poet Ezra Pound didn't think life should revolve around surviving grizzly bear attacks.

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While Pound would have agreed with London that the beauty of human life was connected

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to some basic animal desireÉ

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Éthis future fascist believed that mankind could only return to its apex by studying

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the classic art of the ancient world...

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...although Pound may not have been as interested in classic art as he let on.

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After all, his favorite stories were about Dionysus<<die-oh-nigh-sis>>, who just so happens

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to be the ancient Greek god of wine, sex, and a really good time.

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Pound's good buddy T.S. Eliot bought into the whole Òclassic-art-can-make-us-betterÓ

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thing.

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However, unlike Pound, Eliot was pretty sure wine and sex weren't an integral part of humanity's

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revitalization. He preferred a more spiritual approach to life.

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In Eliot's opinion, most people were just too ignorant to realize how beautiful the

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world was long ago...

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...and the only way to get back to that beautiful world, Eliot thoughtÉ was to read about it.

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Then there's the British novelist Aldous Huxley, whose masterpiece Brave New World describes

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a terrible future for humanity. Is there a terminator apocalypse, complete with the Governator?

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Nope.

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Has nuclear armaggedon turned the world into a radioactive wasteland? Nuh-uh.

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Is mankind plagued by Graboids? No.

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The reason why Huxley's world is so awful is because people get absolutely everything

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they want out of life. Anticlimactic, no? For Huxley, the problem with the modern world

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wasn't that people were suffering and unhappy. It's that they weren't experiencing enough

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suffering and unhappiness.

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In his opinion, the human spirit couldn't thrive without a dunk in the Well of Despair

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every now and again.

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With mankind living it up with the help of dishwashers and antidepressants, the human

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soul was doomed to wither like a dying flower. Doomed, we say. Doooooomed.

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And that's what four of the titans of Modernism thought about the seeming crisis of the early

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twentieth century.

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While they may not have agreed on what exactly was wrong with the world, all four believed

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that something was amiss and in need of fixing...

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...although the wide variety of solutions they offered gives a whole new meaning to

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the phrase, ÒThere's more than one way to crack an egg.Ó

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