"On or about December 1910 human character changed"

[ish mailian]

All New York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed
into corporations, were demanding a new type of man,—a man with ten
times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type,—for whom
they were ready to pay millions at sight. As one jolted over the
pavements or read the last week’s newspapers, the new man seemed close
at hand, for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength,
and his failure had become catastrophic. Every one saw it, and every
municipal election shrieked chaos. A traveller in the highways of
history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue,
and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy,
conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to
conceive whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The
two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from
Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.

H. Adams 1905

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 5:03 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Virginia Woolf is always saying and we have quoted her here.
>
> Did we know--I didn't--that F.S. Fitzgerald wrote of the great change in the self-conception
> Of Americans between 1910-20?
>                                         ----" My Generation" in My Lost City, p. 194
>
> Sent from my iPad-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l