fiefoe

The title article:

Max sees his life as a triumph over "don'ts."
Almost everybody I meet in San Francisco has to go to court at some point in the middle future. I never ask why.
I tell him I am thirty-two. It takes a few minutes, but Norris rises to it. "Don't worry," he says at last. "There's old hippies too."
"It was during the great banana bubble. You had to kind of force your personality and the banana peels down their throats."
"Ecstasy's not the right word at all,.. It makes you think of some ...mundane ecstacy."
(The children) are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it.
I am still committed to the idea that the ability of think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from "a broken home".

The note-keeper strikes a chord in me, even though that's not the easiest way to live with oneself:

Keepers of private notebooks are.. lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
It is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt.
Maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.
Some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, .. on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be.. paid passage back to the world out there.
Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast.. the rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout.
something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (Reply)