Myra-Breckinridge-Gore-Vidal

for a dying youth than as baubles for the coarse hands ofsome horny boy. But sex does not appear to be the hangupwith this crowd. They wear buttons which, among otherthings, accuse the Governor of California of being aLesbian, the President of being God, and Frodo (acharacter in a fairy tale by Tolkien) of actually existing. Thisis all a bit fey for my taste. But one must be open to everyexperience and the young, in a sense, lead us since thereare now more of them than there are of us. But they arepeculiar creatures, particularly to one brought up within thecontext of the Forties. They are quite relaxed about sex; notonly do they have affairs with one another, they also attendorgies in a most matter-of-fact way, so unlike mygeneration with its belief in the highly concentrated sort oflove that Leslie Howard felt for Ingrid Bergman inIntermezzo. Yet despite all this athleticism, their trueinterests seem to be, in some odd way, outside sex. Theylike to sit for long periods doing nothing at all, just listeningto music or to what they regard as music. They areessentially passive; hence the popularity of pot. Of course,my generation (chronologically, not spiritually) began allthis. We of the Fifties saw the beginning of Zen as apopular force. Certainly our Beats were nothing if notpassive in their attitude to life and experience. They werealways departing, never arriving. Neither Myron nor I sharedtheir pleasures or attitudes for we were, despite our youth,a throwback to the Forties, to the last moment in humanhistory when it was possible to possess a total commitmentto something outside oneself. I mean of course the war and