AustLit

'An interesting process in life is the way in which one moves through the generations. Is a generation really thirty-three years, or is it only ten? But what a long time ten years is. When you meet someone whom you haven't seen for fifteen years, or even ten, it doesn't seem like a generation, it is another life. And so many of one's old friends are ghosts. Did they really look like that, talk like that? Did one ever really understand them? Great wedges of their personality have been withdrawn or have just collapsed, since one last met them. They look like disused piers. Are these wedges Marxism-Leninism, or the other things one argued about or just thought about in the 'forties and 'fifties? If they are, then these old friends couldn't have been living during those years - just killing time, and youth, and fantasy Fascists. Perhaps the realisation of those lost years is weighing us all down. Perhaps ten or twenty years out of one's life, no matter how spent, leaves its mark. But put that way, ten or twenty years doesn't seem long at all. They shouldn't look so crapped off.' (Publication abstract)