306 Part III: Emigration Years
intermediary position of those social critics who both live in society and
are yet not quite of it. This state of uncertainty between inside and
outside was the ideal observation post from his point of view. Not being
tied down in this sense was the ideal experiential background and at the
same time the reference point for the formation of moral judgement.
Adorno succeeded in training his gaze on society from the standpoint of
someone dwelling in no man’s land. His privileged personal situation
did not prevent him from registering the fact that life had changed into
‘a timeless succession of shocks’,^156 mediated by the daily newspaper
reports and newsreel pictures about the world war and the annihilation
of human beings. Neither the relative security of Adorno’s material
circumstances, of whose advantages he was well aware, nor the view
of the enchanting landscape and the Pacific Ocean gleaming in the
distance, seduced him into deceiving himself about the element of luck
to which he owed his escape.
Even the blossoming tree tells a lie the moment its bloom is
seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent ‘How lovely!’
becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and
there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling
on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of
negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.^157The mood of Adorno’s ‘dialogue intérieur’ provided a striking con-
trast with his private utterances in his letters. Although he personally
valued the comfort of his life in South Kenter Avenue, his diagnosis in
one of his aphorisms was that it ‘is part of morality not to be at home in
one’s home’.^158 As if describing his own situation, he asked ‘What does
it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to
open, but only sash windows to shove up and down, no gentle latches,
but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep to the street, no wall
round the garden?’^159 And while he admired the American landscape in
his letters, he complained about it here because the roads ‘are always
inserted directly in the landscape, and the more impressively smooth
and broad they are, the more unrelated and violent their gleaming track
appears against its wild, overgrown surroundings.’^160
Adorno’s observations register idiosyncratically the dissolution of the
bourgeois world so that the anti-bourgeois intellectuals ‘are at once the
last enemies of the bourgeois and the last bourgeois’^161 and, paradoxically,
they find themselves defending the ruins of the bourgeoisie against
its late bourgeois enemies. But for all his criticism of American mass
culture, he made no attempt to play off past bourgeois forms of universal
education and higher culture against the levelling pressures to conform
to the society in which he was living. The good qualities of the bourgeois
way of life, such as autonomy and foresight, have revealed their bad
side and turn out to be no more than egocentrism and pig-headedness.