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Three Generations

July 13th, 2007 · 3 Comments

F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “Echoes of the Jazz Age”:

Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth. Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn’t want to know said “Yes, we have no bananas,” and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were—and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.

Hunter Stockton Thompson, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run…but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. …

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. …

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. …

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.


Anonymous:

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3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 sangfroid826 // Jul 13, 2007 at 6:51 pm

    Genius. I may have to print this out.

  • 2 JasonL // Jul 14, 2007 at 10:03 am

    I wonder about that common sentiment in the earlier two generations sometimes. Every once in a while when I read a rhapsody for a certain time and place, I get the feeling that it is a celebration of deluded ignorance. Things weren’t as clear as all that, it is just that your head was up your ass.

    I’d rather hear something like “You know, I had a win at the office the other day. I came home, had a decent meal and hung out on the patio for a few hours. Life is pretty good on balance.”

  • 3 Eric Scharf // Jul 14, 2007 at 11:29 am

    Was it too much trouble to crack open Palahniuk?

    I am helpless.

    I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things.

    My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never
    told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name
    it “Entourage.”

    This is how bad your life can get.

    Kill me.