You are all a lost generation.

[with credit to Gertrude Stein]

You are all a lost generation.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called "lost generation."

"You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

I'm lost, I'll probably always be lost.

Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.

What came is gone forever every time

The belief that society was in decline was a permanent characteristic of every era. People always believed they lived in a crumbling world. They themselves were of course okay, but everyone around them was headed downhill.

I feel that we are the lost generation. We didn’t want to be as our mothers were. We dreamed to be different, we are trying to be different, but we will never be the women we dreamed we were going to be, because we – we have all this burden of the past, calling us every day, we are in no-woman’s land, you know. With cross fire, but we are staying there, to – to be able to – to cross the fire. (BM: And poetry is a record of that journey?) DZ: Yes.

"Ours was a generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken" —

Every generation’s breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation’s
Technology

“All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”

I thought—To lose all this forever?
And I hallucinated Aenea’s voice saying To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love.

It will always remain incomprehensible that our generation, which has shown itself so great by its discoveries and inventions, could fall so low in the realms of thought.