«You
expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell
from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold,
wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the
river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and
killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason».
Ernest
Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (Chapter 4, People of the Seine)
Each
epoch has to face its lost generation, it seems an unwritten historical rule.
Inventor of this popular definition is the famous writer Ernest Hemingway,
referring to the European and American youngs who have come of age during the
World War One. Hemingway loaded the expression in the epigraph to his first
novel Fiesta and then in his well known book of memories, A Moveable Feast.
In
Hemingway’s pages “lost generation” marks the inability of the young survivors
to become part of the society, serving it usefully and actively. It was the
strict and indifferent position of the "fathers". This point of view carries an
ethical opinion that Hemingway discussed and refused. In his idea, running the
different human ages, no group can assume the role of critic, judging the other
generations, above all attacking the youngs.
Staring
at a new kind of struggle that was going on to shake the after war Occidental
societies, the great novelist felt compelled to evidence the controversy,
defending all the youngs who lived the big drama at the front.
But
there’s another declination of Hemingway’s tag. A lost is something that never
comes back. Talking about soldiers are the ones who were defeated by death. Many
eminent artists and intellectuals disappeared, as Franz Marc, Umberto Boccioni,
Egon Schiele, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, brother of Marcel Duchamp,
the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, killed by the 1918 flu pandemic – the corpse
was discovered at home by his friend and colleague Giuseppe Ungaretti – the anthropologist
Robert Hertz, scholar of Émile Durkheim, killed in action (April, 1915) while
volunteering for active service. And it’s just only a sample list.
Such a
situation reminds us of the shock for the Black Death, when human and cultural
energies were destroyed by the virulent plague of 1348. Each perturbant and
large scale spreading event, has an
impact on a society and it’s destinated to prolong the effects.
