Nathan Gardels and Kathleen Miles:
As the poet Archibald MacLeish understood, a world ends when its metaphor has died. At the moment of such a rupture, a new space opens up in place of the shattered status quo. Illusions about an old order vanish, making way for what has been incubating to emerge. Above all, a rupture demands choices about the foundations of the future.
We grew up with our parents’ and grandparents’ experience that each person can and must plan, develop, and shape his own life, that there is a life work on which one must decide, and that he can and must pursue this with all his might. But from our own experience we have learned that we cannot even plan for the next day, that what we have built up is destroyed overnight. Our lives, unlike our parents’ lives, have become formless or even fragmentary. … If we come through the wreckage of a lifetime’s acquired goods with our living souls intact, let us be satisfied with that. … It will be the task of our generation, not to “seek great things,” but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that this is the only thing we can carry as “booty” out of the burning house. “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Prov. 4:23). We shall have to bear our lives more than to shape them, to hope more than to plan, to hold out more than to stride ahead. But for you, the younger, newborn generation, we want to preserve that soul, which will empower you to plan and build up and give shape to a new and better life.