So it has been almost two months since I last posted, but I have not stopped reading! To those who may have lost track: March was the 20s, April is the 30s (for thirty more minutes), and May will be the 40s. However, for a few reasons, I have sorta been stuck in the 20s for this entire month. The main reason I decided to do that is because I was looking at lists and I realized I didn’t have much interest in many of the 30s books that I hadn’t read. Don’t get me wrong, there are some WONDERFUL books from that decade (Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Brave New World, The Hobbit, Gone With the Wind, As I Lay Dying, to name a few). However, I have already read the first four of that list, and while I hope to tackle those last two at some point in my life, I am a little too intimidated to attempt them now. THEREFORE: I have been just reading 20s books recently. But I am almost ready to move into the 40s! Also, I am reaching that point where I realize I will really be missing out on the ‘flavor’ of these decades if I don’t delve a little more into movies and music! So for the next month or so I will probably be bouncing all over the place in terms of decade and medium.
So there’s my long update. On to the books I’ve read!
The 20s were the decade of the Lost Generation. I read two of this generation’s quintessential works: This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway; and I am currently reading a third: All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. According to Wikipedia (aw yeah scholarly research), the term ‘Lost Generation’ was first popularized when it was used by Hemingway as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises: “You are all a lost generation,” said Gertrude Stein to Hemingway in conversation. The Lost Generation is comprised of the people who grew up and came of age during World War I. As I learned and am still learning from my reading, the war caused an incredible amount of damage to these young people–the ones who died in the war, of course, but also the ones who survived. The men who came back from the war were not the boys who left. As Paul Bäumer, the narrator of All Quiet, says: “We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.” Or as Amory Blaine, the narrator of The Sun Also Rises, puts it: “‘I’m not sure that the war itself had any great effect on either you or me–but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation.'” Hemingway, of course, is not as verbose as Fitzgerald or Remarque, but nevertheless his novel is filled with a sense of listlessness–in characters who don’t have a firm grasp on life after the war, and are just wandering, without attempting to find meaning in their lives past a good buzz and an entertaining bullfight.
And here I thought that the 20s might be a little less depressing than the 10s–instead, I found all of these former soldiers who, after growing up amidst the horror of trench warfare, could not go back to their former lives. Or, maybe more accurately, they didn’t even learn how to live in the first place, since their formative years were spent in the trenches. I, of course, cannot put it any better than any of the authors, so I will leave you with more musings of Paul Bäumer:
“And even if those scenes of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not.
We could never regain the old intimacy with those scenes. It was not any recognition of their beauty and their significance that attracted us, but the communion, the feeling of a comradeship with the things and events of our existence, which cut us off and made the world of our parents a thing incomprehensible to us–for then we surrendered ourselves to events and were lost in them, and the least little thing was enough to carry us down the stream of eternity. Perhaps it was only the privilege of our youth, but as yet we recognized no limits and saw nowhere an end. We had that thrill of expectation in the blood which united us with the course of our days.
To-day we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled–we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there?
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial–I believe we are lost.”
(PS happy times coming soon! Because guess what started in the 1930s? Disney movies!!)
DJ Does a Dozen Decades 