Confessions/Reflections

This afternoon, I began reading "All Quiet on the Western Front; this evening, "Tender is the Night."

The first is a most famous book about German soldiers in the First World War, the second, F. Scott Fitzgerald's invention of The Jazz Age.

People of long passed eras were lucky - they died within their own generation. They weren't presented with the enormous psychological challenge - or Gift - of facing Change with a capital "C."

I am coming at this ripe old age to recognize how "of another era" I truly am.

I love these two new books I've started today. I love the memories and the lore and myths of the early and mid-twentieth century. I am a nostalgic fool. Yes, I like Sting or even Bono or Elvis Costello, but not the way I positively swoon and come unglued over Gershwin or Rogers and Hart or Jerome Kern. Astaire and Brando are still my greatest movie heroes, even while I recognize the talents of Edward Norton and Nicole Kidman.

The kids in their early adulthood are largely strangers to me. I see them now at the college where I work and I notice their goodness and their seriousness towards their studies and towards each other. Yet I cling to the (fictive?) narrative that "we" were sharper, more attuned to Literature and mathematics and the affairs of the world. None of this may be true in any objective sense, but my belief system is an ontological raft bobbing in this ocean of change.

Was cruelty more overt have a century ago?

Two Great Awful Wars allowed for a release of savagery on massive scales. We have little explosions around the globe like this today. But mostly, the crudeness and violence seem to come in small and local doses. Families and neighbours and lovers kill each other. What are 3,000 troops compared to Hiroshima, Dresden, London, Auschwitz?

So much of the differences are simply style. I must forgive the world its bare midriff, pierced lip and i-plugged ears.

The trick is to cherish was has been...and to revel in the new that is good and exciting and hopeful.