The 'Base Compromise' of Youth

THE word is out, according to the September 21 issue of The Boston Globe, that--in the by-now archetypal and wrong-minded battle between Freud's famous lieben and arbeiten (love and work)--arbeiten has finally scored a decisive victory.

"Students say love can wait," proclaims the headline, which goes on to chronicle the stale and dispassionate narratives of several Boston-area undergraduate couples who, although "their romance has lasted longer than many marriages," and who "love each other, or at least [and here's the rub!] like each other a lot," have agreed to a mutual parting of the ways at the end of their undergraduate careers.

"Neither one of us wants to crowd the other one, or influence each other's life decisions right now," Bomba, a mass communications major (what else?), explains to us before a framed photo of her soon-to-be-former mate. Others, they explain coolly, eyes ever on the prize, have opted for such admittedly pleasant diversions as ski bumming and white water rafting, having apparently decided, along with Shakespeare, that their "mistress" eyes are nothing like the sun."

Having acquired a certain license, in my 40th year, to speak of the "younger generation," I must confess that all this rather severely depresses me. On the Harvard campus where I teach, for example, rarely, if ever, do I see the brazen, sap-running spectacle of a hand held, a partner embraced, a kiss tendered (wet or dry), and I cannot help but ask these high-flying, career-tracing, dollar-sniffing, supposedly "younger" persons of the passionate years (to quote someone from their generation, Tracy Chapman): "If not now...when?"

ALTHOUGH these may sound like the voyeuristic, nostalgia-ridden complaints of a menopausal, male professor, there is, from the viewpoint of someone who came of age in the at-least-passionate, though surely not perfect 1960s, something dryly and barrenly antiseptic about this new somberness and deglandularization on the part of youth. There is, I want to shout at them, plenty of time left for the sobering domain of the reality principle to set in, for their ideas of love to be demystified therapized, psychoanalyzed and scrutinized by the masters of irony and the Internal Revenue Code.

But--in the meantime--if it is not the young who are willing to rage against the dying of the light...who is? And what are we old and mid-aged fogies out there to make of what appears to be an entire generation which, to paraphrase old, passionate William Butler Yeats, has more substance in their apathies than in their love?

I have observed this phenomenon not just in the apparent abstinences of the flesh, but everywhere, and I have seen it for years. The poetry students I teach, to my enduring amazement, write rarely if ever about love, and even more rarely about sex. I am, for that matter, more likely to find in my collected stacks a poem about their difficulties with their Macintosh than with their girl- or boyfriend! Where my generation's favorite bumper sticker may have been "MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR," theirs, I am virtually convinced, will in no time be, "MAKE BUCKS, NOT LOVE."

YOU don't need to be a sentimental, moonstruck romantic to grieve for all this. For its implications go far beyond the bedroom or the wedding chapel. For it is only recently, and only in America, I believe, that love has come to be seen as a social and economic soporific, a kind of Quaalude to the energies of career, politics and other achievement. And Willa Cather, I believe, was very wrong in describing what she called "that secondary social man, the lover." Rather it seems to me that the love of a single person--passionate, devoted, consuming, honoring...human--is the fuel that drives and deepens all other social passions and commitments, which connects us to the species in a way which work, career, money and our ever-bloated resumes can only hope to imitate. Und, after all, was the great connective in Freud's formula, not or.

Every generation, every culture, every human individual, it seems to me, earns their right to a certain epitaph--words that sum up, even without entirely describing, the values they stood for, the passions they honored, the choices they made. What saddens me about the generation The Boston Globe, and my own eyes, have so vividly observed and described is that theirs might not have to be these few lines of W.H. Auden's famous "New Year Letter," written on the eve of the Second World War:

Yet who must not, if he reflect,

See how unserious the effect

That he to love's volition gives,

On what base compromise he lives?

Michael C. Blumenthal is an associate professor of English and the director of the Creative Writing Program

The Crimson editorial board welcomes commentary pieces from faculty members or representatives of student organizations. If you wish to submit such a piece, please call or send it to the Editorial Chair. Commentary pieces should be approximately three to four double-spaced pages in length. Signed pieces, letters and commentaries appearing on the editorial page do not necessarily reflect the views of The Crimson editorial board.