:41:02
If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it.
:41:05
It was a generation that often exasperated me,
:41:07
for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle
those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth.
:41:14
But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices
no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.
:41:27
I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle.
:41:29
Concretely it had failed.
:41:31
At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world
could have been won only through the struggle.
:41:39
As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains
in the name of revolutionary purity,
:41:45
while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly
to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives.
:41:51
Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists,
including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom.
:41:57
But it carried with it all those who said, like Ché Guevara,
that they "trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world".
:42:04
They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity,
and their generosity has outlasted their politics.
:42:11
That's why I will never allow it to be said
that youth is wasted on the young.
:42:34
The youth who get together every weekend at Shinjuku
obviously know that they are not on a launching pad toward real life;
:42:39
but they are life, to be eaten on the spot like fresh doughnuts.
:42:42
It's a very simple secret.
:42:45
The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it.
:42:48
The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the thirteenth floor of a building
after having tied her hands,
:42:53
because she'd spoken badly of their class team,
hadn't discovered it yet.
:42:56
Parents who demand an increase in the number of special telephone lines
devoted to the prevention of children's suicides