214
' PARTISAN REVIEW
an entire generation. Chilly age enjoyed the wannth, the fire-all
they had lost and to which they looked back with such great long–
ing. And so they developed an aesthetic claim to the turbulence of their
sons. Shortly before the First World War the editor in chief of a great
German paper said to a young philosopher: "Write me an article on
the living thinker for whom you would joyfully give up all other
thinkers." The young man answered: "I rate Emil Lask very highly."
"To rate very highly
is
nothing," said the disappointed editor; "when
one is young one must overrate." He himself was very circumspect.
The old consider the Younger Generation duty bound to produce emo–
tions, activity, loud talk. It is a guarantee against death--or rather, it
is outshining and outshouting the lives of those who are already dead.
And youth sees itself with the eyes of age, as woman sees herself with
man's eyes.
The poor Younger Generation! It is reproached with not brooding
over parricide; today Freud would really not have discovered the
Oedipus complex. How, born into a revolution, should it
be
revolution–
ary? How, when its parents have no
principl~s,
not even the worst
principles, should it go forth to fight its parents? And how, with the
German inflation, the devaluation of the pound, and New York's
"black Friday" in its life, should it be as unmaterialistic as all the old
materialists expect every youth to be? The survey tells of a professor
of sociology who went fishing with one of his most brilliant pupils,
a young student of medicine. On this occasion the following idyllic
conversation took place:
"Why did you choose medicine?"
"It looks as if there were money to be made in it."
"What are you going to specialize in?"
"In the field where the fees are biggest."
"Has the doctor a particular duty to the community?"
"I have no more duty than anyone else. I am preparing myself
to get the most out of it. I hope to be making a lot of money soon.
In ten years I'd like to retire and do what I really want to do."
"What?"
"Travel, fish, take it easy."
By what law may a grown man think such things-but a youth
not say them? What the medical student said is not "materialistic,"
but honorable and logical. Where one sees no further possibility of fully
living one's life in one's profession, one makes a temporal separation
between the two, and practices one's profession in order to create,
as quickly as possible, a material basis for one's life. These young peo-
