"Like all Gen X-ers, I have been confronted with the absence of my own generation's cohesion, and also, therefore, with the peculiar dilemma of having to choose the temporal direction by which I vacate the emptying space of my generation's tenure—either forward, into the company of younger cohorts who seem unaware that they have dark depths to themselves, and appear to believe that whatever darkness remains can be clarified by rules and language reforms; or backward, to the generation born in the shadow of the Bomb, who tried to break free no matter how blindly, and to discover their own depths no matter how sloppily. For all their foolishness, they knew they had depths, and often knew, wisely, that they were fools. So there is much to cherish from their world, and for a while now I have been trying to see whether we might salvage some of that earlier generation's legacy, and to ensure that it lives on."
At Harper's Magazine, Justin E.H. Smith writes that he is "feeling defeated, and it is a symptom of this defeat that I have withdrawn to live in the past."
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