When my 50th college reunion at Brown was cancelled in May due to the pandemic, a virtual symposium was held on Zoom addressing the topic “Did Our Generation Fail?” I think the answer was Yes, but under the circumstances the verdict was rendered indirectly and diplomatically by the five panel members. I wish I had submitted as evidence the following excerpt from a late chapter in All People Are Famous, the 1974 autobiography by the eminent theater director and critic Harold Clurman, discussing “the younger generation” (us) and quoting from a letter of Anton Chekhov’s: “As long as our boys and girls are still students, they are still honest and good, they’re our hope, our future; but as soon as those students have to stand on their own and grow up, our future goes up in smoke, and all that’s left of the future are cottage-owning doctors, rapacious public officials, and thieving engineers.”
Clurman: “It would surely prove historically disastrous if the generation with a will to change society were to cool off into a neurotic complacency or into the quiet desperation Thoreau spoke of. I ask my students to bank their fires and to clean their weapons of language and thought and use them for something more than a parade.”
