I’m caught in a love affair with a bunch of dead old men: Unstable neurotic alcoholic hermits who have an incredible talent for romanticizing the past. They are my guardians, my lovers, my mentors.

J.D. Salinger

Ernest Hemingway

Rainer Maria Rilke

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The affair began with J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. How exactly a middle-aged man could so thoroughly describe a young college girl’s confusion in just under 40 pages continues to baffle me. And as I approached Franny’s age and now surpass her, the story only becomes more true… as if Salinger’s story had always been my prophecy and I just happened to open the book it was written in.

I’m about to embark on a voyage to Spain, for no good reason, other than I didn’t want to stay here. To warm me up for the occasion, I’ve begun re-reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, whose characters go on a pilgrimage across France and Spain.
Upon resurrecting the book, I couldn’t get past the epigraph that introduces his novel:

“You are all a lost generation”
-Gertrude Stein (in conversation)

Now, the Lost Generation usually describes the time period between the ending of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression and refers to the generation coming of age in the U.S. The term affiliated itself with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and Gertrude Stein. They were described as “‘lost’ because after the war, so many of them were disillusioned with the world in general and unwilling to move into a settle life.”

Perhaps it’s the type of friends I surround myself with, perhaps it’s just this age, or maybe I’m alone on this one, but I can’t help but feel like we’re another “Lost Generation”. As a child, I recall that the 90s was big on talking about how we were the generation of the future…but it seems that we’ve stayed just that: A generation of the future. We bank on future money and hold too closely grand expectations for ourselves. Betrayed and disillusioned not just by our recent destructive war and President but also by our media that keeps us in “wanting mode”.

In liquored conversation with close friend and confidant, Claudio Ambrose, I expressed to him that I was trying to “let go”… let go of the things that this world tells me I should be doing and having the audacity to do what I want with this life. I leaned in with all seriousness, “You know what it feels like? It feels like I’m walking around with a fuckin’ broken heart all day.” A smile grew on his face, “yeah, but it’s amazing that you try.”

Currently, my heart rests in the hands of poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Included in a birthday card on my 24th Birthday, Lizzie Tilles left me this excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet.

“But even so, I think you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in things that are like the ones my eyes are resting on. If you trust in Nature, in the small things that hardly anyone sees and that can suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor, then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

I found myself copying the excerpt into a graduation card yesterday for another friend, thinking it was a suitable topic as she entered the world of “What Next?” As I finished copying it, I found that this excerpt would be suitable for anyone to read. Rilke preceded the literary modernists of the Lost Generation that I look so fondly to and yet his letter to a single poet with whom he corresponded with in 1903 seems to speak to every generation. Perhaps this is because truth is timeless, just as being lost is timeless. I’m learning that “coming of age” can last a lifetime, but its restlessness can be softened by trusting the mess, allowing the unknown, and living the questions.