Why

Here’s how I decided to create this project. One of my correspondents e-mailed me once to ask me if I knew of any good quotes or passages by anybody in the Lost Generation, advice for the youngsters, type of thing. (The Lost Generation were born from 1883-1900. They’re the same generational type as GenX.) I had some stuff around by Groucho Marx and Cornelia Otis Skinner and others, and looked through it all, but didn’t find anything good. Fun to read, but it didn’t let you in on anything. I eventually sent him a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay which was kind of what he asked for. But the real problem was that the Lost Generation just didn’t seem to pass on advice like that.

In their GenX book, 13th Gen, Strauss and Howe have a section on the Lost generation, where they have some sidebar quotes from Lost figures about their people. I read some of those sources too: Malcolm Cowley, Randolph Bourne. And it was the same. They were very concrete and day-to-day, without any reflection or abstraction. Nothing you could really get a lot out of.

And I wondered. What have we learned ourselves, that we would want to pass along to those younger than us? (To be sure, anybody who comes to GenX looking for enlightenment deserves whatever results they get.) Despite our reputation we really have picked up a thing or two in our times, and some of us may even be still learning. Someone should collect that material. And I’m someone. The idea evolved from there, but I hope that that original core is still visible in what will come: the collected wisdom of Generation X.