When Dominic Flandry has learned what will happen to Starkad:
"[Persis] enjoyed the rest of the voyage, even after she had identified the change in him, the thing which had gone and would never quite come back. Youth."
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT CHAPTER FIFTEEN, p. 152.
When Anson Guthrie has killed two terrorists but also lost a friend to them:
"Later he understood that what he had also left behind was his youth."
-Harvest Of Stars, 10, p. 129.
At the same time, another youth is lost:
"The guerilla had been just a kid, maybe sixteen, though he looked about fourteen." (ibid.)
A kid misled: any other course of action would have been preferable to terrorism, whether social conformism or political agitation.
Is there any other loss of youth in Anderson's works?
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I see nothing wrong with "social conformism," when done for the right reasons.
I think we see Manse Everard having something close to a "loss of youth" experience in one of the Time Patrol stories. About how he could really go home to the innocence of the US Mid West of his youth.
Ad astra! Sean
Drat. I meant Everard could NOT really go home to the lost innocence of his youth in the US Mid West.
Sean
Sean,
I thought of that passage about Everard's boyhood in the Mid West but I have quoted it more than once before.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Too late, I realized that bit about Manse Everard may have been cited too often!
Ad astra! Sean
Of course, that youthful guerilla hadn't probably had much youth anyway.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Almost certainly true, given the probable circumstances of, at the very least, his hardscrabble or poverty stricken origins.
Ad astra! Sean
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