Things Were Going to Be So Much Better
Young people in particular are feeling the burden of living in history. On the upside, things can only get so bleak.
In moments of crisis and civil unrest, people always say that things will never be the same. But the act of living is a bit more circular than we give it credit for. Things might never be exactly the same as they once were, but they do tend to at least return to some previous and somehow tolerable baseline. Human beings, facing crisis, find ways to adapt, sometimes ingeniously. Life, otherwise, would be unbearable. To carry on through and beyond tragedy would be impossible, and the only thing more common than tragedy is death.
In Peter De Vries’s novel , published in 1961, the protagonist, experiencing the (temporary) remission
