(i) Alan Moore wanted a drawn "photograph" of some of his comic book characters, the "Watchmen," to convey that feeling of "Look at them all being happy together. They didn't know how it was all going to turn out."
(ii) "Looking back at that magical evening I can see us all with such painful clarity, sophisticated yet innocent, fast but not corrupt - and above all so mercifully blind to that terrible time ahead when the enchanting communitas, the group spirit, of the early 'sixties fell apart and terminated in chaos."
-Susan Howatch, Scandalous Risks (London, 1996), p. 146.
(iii) Poul Anderson's Jack Havig has a time traveler's perspective on the 1960s. Visiting the '60s from the '50s, then exploring the further future, he judges:
"'The war - the war - and its consequences come later...But everything follows from that witches' sabbath I saw part of in Berkeley.'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), IV, p. 42.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And my favorite of good, or at least better, times followed by bad times remains the century from the Congress of Vienna to the Sarajevo Assassination. For all its faults and flaws Western civilization inaugurated world wide huge advances in all fields of life. The dazed survivors looking back on the wreckage left by WW I and the Russian Revolution were seeing the beginnings of an equally huge regression: the rise of totalitarianism and, generally speaking, the centralizing state, the world wars, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
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