If one is gifted for, and does pursue, the writing of good novels, the question if he be writing “for our time” may be secondary. (It was, certainly, not so for Cervantes.)
Not quite the same is true for authors of essays and satire.
If their income is ok, their reputation therewith (or, mostly the same thing, thereby, at least with their wives and relatives), they may not even consider the problem.
Otherwise though, in the half-desert of some reception and little or no money earned, it is, at least for the better, more ambitious ones necessary to ask: “Am I doing this righteously, mainly, just for “our time”?
Or, is it not wiser, apter to this given fate, merely to take up some traits of the ruling zeitgeist, now and then poking some swine-snooted, dough-sooted, picking them nonchalantly up to go for goals beyond the now?
Can we not, should not exactly we, who are given the leisure (or rob it somewhere) to write what doesn’t even pay for wine and cigs, let alone rent and health insurance, give a darned sh.. on what is the latest babble of some petty politician, half-naked celebrity, pseudo-philosophical talkshow nitwit, the bankster whores, the blatant “scientific” lies of the shallow waters of the “expert” circus of the bigshot plutocrat pissoirs?
Of course we must.
But then, it is not advisable to turn ones face completely away from our time, as it is ours. That means: It is the air that we breathe, the palpable human substance around us, thus the muddy pond we’re wading in, may we want this or not, when the times seem unalterably vane and dire.
Nietzsche, for instance, knew full well that he would not develop his wisdom sitting around and praying in some remote cloister, secluded from the rest of the world; he, knowingly, sought no hinterworlds to refine his perception, thought, and aforesight.
If we be true writers, we have to acknowlegde that we cannot evolve by casting ourselves into some time-ridden mental parastate of existence.
The most advanced of mankind need our advice, our purported essence of learnedness and insight; and they need it here and now.
We’d be rascals, traitors, if we were to put that lightly aside.
The beyond, woven out of the here as much as from the past of our valiant forefathers, is the bridge it is ours to weld from the pieces beheld.
P.S.: Naturally, once they’ve granted us cosy cottages, even comely castles, we shall not forget where we came from nor what we are there for still.
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