Wells wrote these disillusioned words in 1945, just before Hiroshima:

“The old men behave for the most part meanly and disgustingly, and the young are spasmodic, foolish and all too easily misled”

“Mind at the End of its Tether”

When C. S. Lewis first encountered Wagner’s Ring opera he was engulfed by a Sense of Joy. He felt “that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single unendurable sense of desire and loss… And at once I knew that to “have it again” was the supreme and only important object of desire”:

Autobiography 1955.