Editorial

When, as has lately happened, the sun comes after a long grey absence, we appreciate its qualities freshly, almost with surprise. That the world should, after all, not be cold and wind-swept, but warm and mellow, strikes us with a delicious strangeness. And just now the coming of the sun is even more of an event than it has been in the past. For people have begun to find a special significance in the sun, rather as those who once worshipped it. They spread out their limbs to receive the sun, and are made the better for having done so. They drink sunshine and find it a fine draught – life-giving and, in a way, truth-giving as well.

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There can be no doubt that in Europe to-day there is a definite movement towards the sun. In Germany especially, and even in England too, men are finding in the sun some principle that seems to satisfy their spiritual uneasiness. It is not merely to get brown that the sun-bathers are so numerous; not merely to absorb this or that kind of ray which the experts recommend as being beneficial. Rather it is because of a new value, the sun value, in the pursuit of which time, that many in the past seeking to pay it the highest compliment have identified with money, is recklessly squandered.

It would be difficult to define this sun value with any exactness. Like all new values it arises partly out of revolt. Industrialism drove mankind indoors, and now from the darkness of coalfields, from the mist of factories, from the half-light of offices mankind is looking at the sun as a caged bird looks at the sky – its element. Is it really necessary, he wonders, that so many should be underground, so many hemmed in always between roof and walls, in order that all may live? And he likes to lie in the sun because there the answer seems emphatically no.

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But there is more in this sun movement than just a revolt against the form of life imposed upon men by a certain type of social organisation. Our civilisation itself, in its religion and its law and its art, has tended to set a roof against the sky. The roof has often been infinitely beautiful, and has let in light gracefully. But it has still been a roof. That is what the Asiatic means when he says that our civilisation is materialistic. Now the light of the sun is a direct light, coming from the highest regions and bringing warmth and ripeness and a quiet impersonal fecundity. As such it seems fittingly to symbolise those large aspirations after a law which transcends the poor architecture of a code, after a religion in terms of such vast concepts that the highest cathedral would be inadequate to contain it, after an art which has thrown aside all the embarrassment of form as hitherto known to express more fully the lovely nakedness of life itself. And it is just such a law, such a religion, such an art that the post-war world is longing for. Therefore the post-war world loves to bask in the sun. Indeed, the whole mood of sun-bathing is lovely. One feels less oneself, less the individual, and more just an aspect of life.

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manchester Guardian, 29 Aug 1930.

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