Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

immense distance — the distance between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the novels

of Stendhal and Balzac in 1830, the distance between the election of Lincoln in 1860 and

the re-election of McKinley in 1900.

Forty years is a long, long time and this epoch is now dosed and a new one is about to

begin. The writers of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties are by no means through but the

coming decade will belong to the writers of your generation.

And because you are an uncommitted generation, you are free to begin not only with the

Perennial Vision of man redeemed and liberated, but also with some truths which are

clearer to all of us today than they were to some of us two decades ago.

In the Thirties many of us thought that the source of the problems which plague man is

society. We know better now. The source of the problems which plague man is — man.

Man cannot live without society and society cannot live without man. Man without

society is a solitary savage. Society without man is the collective savage of the

mechanical nightmare we have today.

What YOU, the uncommitted generation, have to find is not an imaginary but an actual,

living, creative inter-relationship, a true dialectic of man and society.

We cannot give you any specific prescriptions for this. Nobody has the one and only key

that opens all doors; nobody has the one and only answer that is valid for all time and

all the world and all the problems of man. We cannot even give you specific answers to the

specific questions you will encounter in the next stage of the human enterprise, which is

yours. We cannot foresee your questions and answers because we cannot foresee your world

any more than you can; and we won’t be there but you will.

That world will evolve out of ours, but it will be uniquely yours. You will have to

advance your heritage and achieve your goals by asking your own questions and finding your

own answers. Better still, you will create your answers and thereby you will create

your world.

And if your questions are right, your answers will be right; and if your answers are

right, your world will be right.

The literary spokesmen of the new spring will be young writers who are now between