Richard Fernandez:
Some social commentators have noted a mood of disillusionment. “Millennials report depression in higher numbers than any previous generation”, up to one in five. People appear to be tuning out of politicized “comedy”, sports and entertainment, exhausted by the public frenzy. It’s a direct consequence of the fall of the Narrative. The irony is having given people apps to order pizza, Tinder date or a cab within minutes we have yet to create an app that gives them a reason to live, where the starveling depression-raised Greatest Generation could find it in themselves to cross a fire-swept beach in hope.
Here.
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For whatever reason Fernandez’s essay made me think of a passage by John Lukacs, a Hungarian-American historian I admire very much, from his 1970 book The Passing of the Modern Age. If I may I’ll quote it here Malcolm, since Lukacs provides some common sense that perhaps all of us can benefit from. “We have now entered a world where love is becoming, curiously enough, more and more necessary and even practical. Among us there exist a happy few whose internal lives will be marvoulously safe from much of the terror and lonliness of the new Dark Ages. They will have discovered that love, like inspiration, cannot be conceived as a gift of the Gods, a divine breath of bliss coming from without. They will have learned that, like inspiration, love must come from within: that, like imagination, it is a flower that must be cultivated with constantcy, beyond its first bloom so that it will eventually grow into the kind of profound respect that constitutes the very dignity of human love.”