#generation lost

from ‘A Moveable Feast’

Ernest Hemingway

[...] when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation. She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein’s Ford. Anyway he had not been sérieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein’s protest. The patronhad said to him, “You are all a génération perdue.”

“That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,” Miss Stein said. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”

“Really?” I said.

“You are,” she insisted. “You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death....”

“Was the young mechanic drunk?” I asked.

“Of course not.”

“Have you ever seen me drunk?”

“No. But your friends are drunk.”

“I’ve been drunk,” I said. “But I don’t come here drunk.”

“Of course not. I didn’t say that.”

“The boy’s patron was probably drunk by eleven o’clock in the morning,” I said. “That’s why he makes such lovely phrases.”

“Don’t argue with me, Hemingway,” Miss Stein said. “It does no good at all. You’re all a lost generation, exactly as the garage keeper said.”

[...]

I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation? Then as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a fiasco he’d made of Waterloo, I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill.

---

Bonus of pure gold:

When I got home and into the courtyard and upstairs and saw my wife and my son and his cat, F. Puss, all of them happy and a fire in the fireplace, I said to my wife, “You know, Gertrude is nice, anyway.”

“Of course, Tatie.”

“But she does talk a lot of rot sometimes.”