for P
“The Age of Irony is dead,” she said.
The priest and poet nodded in assent.
“How did it die?” said I, waiting in dread
to hear of destruction without consent.
The priest had just one brief explanation:
“It was demolished while we slept in.”
The poet spoke of assassination:
“Quiet as a mouse, sincerity crept in,
and wrested the throne from that cynic king.
‘Subtle’ is the past; truth has a new sheen.”
“Ages change,” she said. “They are finicky.
You needed to know. I don’t mean to be mean.”
I turned first to priest, then poet, then she,
“If my Age is gone, why did it leave me?”
_________________________________________
Joan Didion in Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11:
I found in New York that “the death of irony” had already been declared, repeatedly and curiously , since irony had been declared dead at the precise moment – given that the gravity of September 11 derived specifically from its designated implosion of historical ironies – when we might have seemed most in need of it.
Søren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Irony… (1841):
In our age there has been much talk about the importance of doubt for science and scholarship, but what doubt is to science, irony is to personal life. Just as scientists maintain that there is not true science without doubt, so it may be maintained with the same right that no genuinely human life is possible without irony.