Things are coming to pieces....

[gray_ghost]

Shit...a WSJ article I actually kind of agree with....[A Separate Peace: by Peggy Noonan]

Loved this:

A few weeks ago I was chatting with friends about the sheer number of things parents now buy for teenage girls--bags and earrings and shoes. When I was young we didn't wear earrings, but if we had, everyone would have had a pair or two. I know a 12-year-old with dozens of pairs. They're thrown all over her desk and bureau. She's not rich, and they're inexpensive, but her parents buy her more when she wants them. Someone said, "It's affluence," and someone else nodded, but I said, "Yeah, but it's also the fear parents have that we're at the end of something, and they want their kids to have good memories. They're buying them good memories, in this case the joy a kid feels right down to her stomach when the earrings are taken out of the case."

Or maybe agree isn't quite the write word. It's just the feeling I get when I read something that is so wonderfully morose that it sends shivers up my spine. A lot like the poem I pasted below, actually. And I wonder, how could a writer for the WSJ totally forget her Yeats? Because it's not exactly the first time people have passed down this path....

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Comments

[katekat]

Huh. This is a really interesting article (thanks for telling me to go back and read it, btw).

Although I've got to ask: was there any modern generation that really felt like the previous one wasn't slighly better off than the current state of affairs? This bizzare nostalgia that she creates, especially with the whole teenager thing, works on one level to make me really uncomfortable (what if it's true? What if she's right? What if the 'trolley' is broken), and on another to make me question her perspective - because it seems to me that it's a distinctly modern problem to feel like we're hurtling into the abyss.

But her thing at the end, where she puts the responsibility squarely on the elites to stop hoarding and start actually making things better... I definitely agree with that.

Did it bother you at all that she called it A Seperate Peice though? Because I really really loved "A Seperate Peace" and kept hearing that in my head, and that is *alltogether* a different concept.

[gray-ghost.livejournal.com]

meh...you must remember that she's a Republican complaining about the end of the world. And...ummm....like a member in good standing of the 'media elite' which she happens to be castigating.

And yeah...it did both me that she referenced a Separate Peace and not that poem by Yeats. Because Yeats is far more applicable to the emotional state she finds herself in. But I think she didn't reference Yeats because of the not so hidden references to war mongers taking over the world and sending humans into a new dark age. And it probably didn't sit to well with some of the other things she's done in life - like being a fomrer speach writer for Bush Sr.