Mircea Eliade on the Problem of Industrial Civilisation: No Souvenirs : Journal, 1957-1969

This evening, while I was making the trip from the campus to town, I watched the headlights of the cars on the road through the train window. They formed a single, dazzling, slightly wavy line. All these people were going home, that is, twenty or a hundred kilometers from their offices in the center of Chicago. Wherever one goes in the United States, one can always see the same thing everywhere: people hurrying to go home or to go to work; thousands, or tens or hundreds of thousands of cars next to one another, one after the other.

What makes it serious is that there is nothing that can be done about it. Tomorrow, or the day after, it will be the same thing in Europe. (The sadness that overwhelms me at night in Paris every time I go home and look at those rows of cars parked on the two sides of the street.) For that is the very problem that is obsessing me: although I see man crushed, asphyxiated, diminished by industrial civilization, I can't believe that he will degenerate, decline morally, and finally perish, completely sterile. I have a limitless confidence in the creative power of the mind. It seems to me that man will succeed - if he wishes - in remaining free and creative, in any circumstance, cosmic or historical.

But how can the miracle be brought about? How can the sacramental dimension of existence be rediscovered? At this point, so much can be said: All the things that have existed we have not definitively lost; we find them again in our dreams and our longings. And the poets have kept them. This is to say nothing of the religious life, because the authenticity and depth of the religious life among my contemporaries seems to me a most mysterious problem.

There must be a way out. Aldous Huxley proposes mescaline, alcohol and drugs. There would be a great deal to say on that score.