out our futilities to each other across
the stage until the last silly curtain falls _plump!_ upon our bobbing
heads. But you are starting the spluttering magic-lantern show of life
with much the same array of slides as I had, so I need to write you if
only to shriek the colossal stupidity of people....

This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never again
be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we meet as we
have met, because your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine
ever grew, nourished as they were on the stuff of the nineties.

Amory, lately I reread Aeschylus and there in the divine irony of the
"Agamemnon" I find the only answer to this bitter age--all the world
tumbled about our ears, and the closest parallel ages back in that
hopeless resignation. There are times when I think of the men out there
as Roman legionaries, miles from their corrupt city, stemming back the
hordes... hordes a little more menacing, after all, than the corrupt
city... another blind blow at the race, furies that we passed with
ovations years ago, over whose corpses we bleated triumphantly all
through the Victorian era....

And afterward an out-and-out materialistic world--and the Catholic
Church. I wonder where you'll fit in. Of one thing I'm sure--Celtic
you'll live and Celtic you'll die; so if you don't use heaven as a
continual referendum for your ideas you'll find earth a continual recall
to your ambitions.

Amory, I've discovered suddenly that I'm an old man. Like all old
men, I've had dreams sometimes and I'm going to tell you of them. I've
enjoyed imagining that you were my son, that perhaps when I was young
I went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I came to, had no
recollection of it... it's the paternal instinct, Amory--celibacy goes
deeper than the flesh....

Sometimes I think that the explanation of our deep resemblance is some
common ancestor, and I find that the only blood that the Darcys and
the O'Haras have in common is that of the O'Donahues... Stephen was his
name, I think....

When the lightning strikes one of us it strikes both: you had hardly
arrived at the port of embarkation when I got my papers to start for
Rome, and I am waiting every moment to be told where to take ship. Even
before you get this letter I shall be on the ocean; then will come your
turn. You went to war as a gentleman should, just as you went to school
and college, because it was the th