My Childhood Universities single work   essay  
Is part of The Temperament of Generations Various , 1940 sequence essay (number 11 in series)
Issue Details: First known date: 1968... 1968 My Childhood Universities
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'An interesting process in life is the way in which one moves through the generations. Is a generation really thirty-three years, or is it only ten? But what a long time ten years is. When you meet someone whom you haven't seen for fifteen years, or even ten, it doesn't seem like a generation, it is another life. And so many of one's old friends are ghosts. Did they really look like that, talk like that? Did one ever really understand them? Great wedges of their personality have been withdrawn or have just collapsed, since one last met them. They look like disused piers. Are these wedges Marxism-Leninism, or the other things one argued about or just thought about in the 'forties and 'fifties? If they are, then these old friends couldn't have been living during those years - just killing time, and youth, and fantasy Fascists. Perhaps the realisation of those lost years is weighing us all down. Perhaps ten or twenty years out of one's life, no matter how spent, leaves its mark. But put that way, ten or twenty years doesn't seem long at all. They shouldn't look so crapped off.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Meanjin Quarterly vol. 27 no. 4 Summer 1968 Z607293 1968 periodical issue 1968 pg. 493-495
Last amended 27 Jul 2018 13:28:30
493-495 My Childhood Universitiessmall AustLit logo Meanjin Quarterly
Informit * Subscription service. Check your library.
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X