Utrillo's Children; A Memoir of Paris In 1969. Robert Ph.D Dick
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Utrillo's Children; A Memoir of Paris In 1969 - Robert Ph.D Dick страница 3
Название: Utrillo's Children; A Memoir of Paris In 1969
Автор: Robert Ph.D Dick
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Учебная литература
isbn: 9780984011797
isbn:
It was l965, and the shit was beginning to hit the fan all around the country. Vietnam was all over us, and it seemed corrupt leadership was in control, both in Europe and in Washington D.C. Anybody under thirty, even the super patriots, knew the shit house was starting to burn.
Jon wrote of these issues and spoke of the general dissatisfaction of Europe's youth, as they, like us, began to challenge old post-war elites who were digging in to hold their power. Old class systems and social designs were tottering with age. According to Marqua's letter, it was not going to take much to light the match.
He was right. Events in America were moving quicker, and places like Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were becoming hot topics. Enrollments in college humanities classes were skyrocketing.
By the mid l960s, my draft board was after me and everything was getting a rough edge to it. I wasn't sleeping well. I told this to Professor Johnson. His eyes dropped, he shook his head in pain, reached out and held my hands. My hands were holding Jon's letter. Then he said, “I want now to translate Jon's closing to us.” He took the letter from me, put on his glasses, and said to me while shaking his head, “I've never had a letter like this one.” As I listened intently, he then read the last paragraph again, and a lot of memories rushed back. Jon had signed off:
“L'Enfant Perdu, Jon” (The Lost Child, Jon)
Like a shot at an execution, those words and that meeting with Dr. Johnson, stayed with me in the months and years ahead. If a guy like Marqua had surveyed the scene, and felt himself to be a lost child, what the hell was ahead of me–of all of us?
As it began playing out, as the months and years clicked off, the youth of my generation would become lost in a lot of ways. We would be recruited by patriotism; we would be recruited by family traditions, we would be recruited by absurd social, military, and political policies–policies advocated by leadership almost totally out of touch with their nation's young. Many became lost and confused by conflicting loves and loyalties. Vietnam, and all that it would do to us, would take my generation down roads of turmoil, heartbreak and social revolution.
Leadership would create conditions where families, communities, universities, and whole cities would be ripped apart and fall in flames. Looking back, the discussions I had with Dr. Johnson, with Marqua, with my group, and with other students and teachers, were a fore-gleam to the conflict, insanity, and horror of the next five to eight years. I was 22-years-old.
Books & Television
By my early 20s, I was reading and studying heavily. I had been fortunate, along with tens of thousands of others of my age, to go to college in the l960s, just fifteen years after World War II. It started as a halcyon time. Books–good books leading to good discussions and debate–were read and thought about. In student unions, in dorm rooms, we talked about life and love, and beautiful women. We knew we were lucky to be there, but we also knew some things weren't right. The great teachers were teaching us critical thinking. They taught us about those who died for causes. There were electrifying courses called The Democratic Society, and The History of Parliamentary Democracy, and Eros and Civilization, that moved all of us into moments of introspection and thought. Seminars on class, race, sociology, philosophy, economics, and math, were all subjects required for the student to obtain a Bachelors Degree, a college education that often was the first one in many American families.
Still, the more we got educated the more challenging we got. Increasingly, we knew we had power which was charged by the thrill of our youth, and we got real possessive of our youth. My age group’s exposure to high-level thought would saturate our life efforts and lead us to examine dictate and doctrine. Mix these motivations, book readings, and television's increasing coverage of domestic and world events together, and citizens were being created that weren't going to accept traditional power elites and the usual methods of governance. We believed in Jeffersonian democracy. “Nay! We really believed in Jeffersonian democracy.” We were changing, and we were no longer like our fathers.
Ernest Hemingway's book, A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris in the l920s, has sections that have a lot of discussion about books. Indeed, several of his significant friends, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and of course Sylvia Beach, guided his reading and thinking while he was in Paris. Like young Hemingway, we were ready to get our teeth into some good stuff–some good literature, some good history and philosophy. So what did we read? What did I read? Vividly, I remember getting my hands on some of the following; Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, George Orwell's, l984, Aldous Huxely's, Brave New World, Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy In A New Key, and of course J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Other books tweaked our interest as well. Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and mathematician, took a stance opposing the Vietnam War. His viewpoint was popular, and his work, Why I Am Not A Christian, helped fuel the “God is Dead” movement.
For those who might part company with Russell's views but still have questions about traditional biblical approaches, there was Eric Fromm's radical humanism found in, Ye Shall Be As Gods, a small work with a twist on the Torah, and even the New Testament. Fromm's “Weltanschauung” was of interest to Jewish kids who might be finding their synagogues a bit of a bore.
Richard Cobb, Author of A Second Identity.
Also coming out in l969 was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a book about Vonnegut's own experiences as a young 22-year-old soldier during the allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany. As the future would prove, many of the above books would be on the ban list of numerous organizations and institutions.
Such books as these, and of course there were many more, supplied vast amounts of intellectual food–they made us think and question, and we became a little more stiff-necked with our elders. We gradually understood that controlling information was key to authoritarianism and control. And speaking for myself, I began to understand Hitler's book burnings a little better. Another book comes to mind–A Second Identity by Richard Cobb. Cobb, a British historian and Francophile, was a legend in his own time. He wrote articles, he wrote books, and he lived and wrote in France for long periods of his life.
This guy was brilliant and a character. Once, he was known to have watched the dawn come up while nude (along with several others) at the Place de la Concorde in central Paris. He seldom gave a lecture without a pint near by. Cobb's writings and his views of history had an impact on me. He wrote once, “that if you want to understand history, you are not going to find it out in charts, corporate printouts or economic models, but in the mental world of crackpots, and eccentrics of humanity.”
He felt that only from those who lived life with some gusto, who lived life by passion and not by Guggenheims, would histories be written about the truths of historical movements. Such writings would get into the guts of what it meant to be alive, to be young, to be in love, to be in charge of your own existence. Cobb's positions came alive with the writings of someone like Ernest Hemingway.
If anybody sucked all he could out of life, it was this American writer. I first read Hemingway in the mid l960s. Although I think we wondered about his l961 suicide, here was a guy who could deliver a punch. His books and СКАЧАТЬ