Name That Tune

[Steelhead]

This quotation is from an essay we know TRP read, and re-read. A pint of
Terminator Stout for the first P-lister to identify the author and the
essay. (This is t-o-o-o-o-o easy!):

Probably, we will never be able to determine the pyschic havoc of the
concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost
everyone alive in these years.  For the first time in civilized history,
perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live
with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality
or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas
and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still
be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which
our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death
itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not
follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had
chosen, but rather a death by _deus ex machina_ in a gas chamber or a
radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization-that civilization
founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time,
mastering the links of social cause and effect-in the middle of an economic
civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be
subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable
anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time
deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.

With effervescent regards,

Steelhead