The headnote says that Esquire asked for a piece on speculation about the probability of a new Golden Age; they did not take it; so the speculation didn't pay off.
The king in his counting-house finds enough gold to maintain the golden age that had already begun, in wobbly fashion, and almost unnoticed; earlier hoards proved corn and honey; this is genuine gold by sophisticated tests. His gauges show the gaps between peoples, parties, and zeitgeists narrowed to lively spark-gaps: It was all very electric and impregnating. The gold was transmuted from trash: No. From splendid trash.
In our own time we are already into a golden age of the arts and sciences and technologies and life-settings, against all opinion. The hecklers in parentheses (rotten-rock music, blind-goat art, porno and corno) are answered with Sure we are. Say it quickly and casually and it goes down more easily.
What prevents an age from goldening is gaps that do not narrow, and blocks of worthlessness. Snow's Two Cultures gap, once abysmal, has narrowed to a productive spark-gap; a field he works in, Science Fiction, had a call to bridge this gap, and still has it. The long list of other gaps ends with young and old, men and women, minor ones, have never amounted to much.
The Greeks were not bothered by gaps: arts and sciences together were Musics, provinces of the Muses; the list from flute-playing to temple-worship and map-drawing, and Elegance, a certified music still. Molecular biology has become a music; sub-atomic physics is orchestrated; sociology half a music; group and personal scenarios real musics.
The synthesis is imperfect by requirement; the gaps become communicating spark-gaps with painted lightning. Societies have analogs to mathematical functions: integral, differential, tensor societies; patterns from Boolean algebra, Riemann geometry, Fuchs's theorem, the Christoffel symbol, the Born-Mayer equation. Life imitates art, yes. But just as strongly does life imitate science and mathematics.
Kids are smarter than they used to be. They got smarter all at once, just the other day, the day that the golden age began. A science must be a lively science, realized by enough people to give a tone to the scene.
The trash is nostalgic trash, remembered as better than it was; transmuting-nostalgia is an alchemical action, in Homer's layers of retelling as much as now. These layers are the living roots.
As to the hot poster colors, nature's colors changed first (polluted or enriched atmosphere, fertilizer, new wheats Kaw and Concho, grapes, hybrid corn), and the human range of color vision may have widened; the new art's hues are burlesques of new natural hues.
The inventory of trash worked into the golden mosaic: comic strips, ice-cream chairs, amusement parks, games, Get-and-Go stores, quasars and quarks, fountain pens, fandoms and fermions, welded sculpture, shaggy people jokes, dune buggies, gadgetry and quackery. TV lives on old movies, noble trash; the cinema's own trash is young. Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudism are real pulp theories kept working by transmuting-nostalgia.
Poetry has been plucked bare of rime, metre, and imagery, and what is left is shredded and strewn gold; rime survives in molecular biology. Painting is in pretty good health, growing out of American trash (Homer, Eakins, Sargent, Held, the Western painters, Hofmann, de Kooning, Rockwell, Wyeth, Kienholz, Pollock, Weber: no giant, no midget); Contemporary art is aided by contemporary nostalgia.
Music lags, despite the Country-and-Western element and creative participation; rock would be better at one-tenth the volume (It won't stand listening to, a lady rockist agrees); Wagner was pulp intended for future grinding; there are people who will kill you if you say that rock isn't the greatest.
In writing, the printed underlay is thick; the American golden age of the 1920s was a practice one; the raw material is the pulp material literally, the hundred years of genre tales and pulp magazines (St. Nicholas, Black Mask, Oliver Optic, Oliver Onions), the boys' series, the Westerns, the detectives: This is the Group Unconscious of American Literature and it has become a very active form.
Architecture grows new gracefully. In anthropology, The Law of Intellectual Constancy had just recently become true, every human with about the same potential in buckets of different shapes; it was not true fifty years ago. Drama is looking for its stage; the qualities of the new drama listed.
The steep things, the eschatological things, go on the same and keep the same accounts, but in sharper focus through the golden glass; the golden age itself has a touch of the eschatological and the eternal; it has not duration but that vaster thing, moment.
The thousand giants in the hundred fields will not be listed, to avoid controversy. “Unmisered gold in open booths for all.” Now we're talking real Golden Gobbler Turkey!