My Generation Read Online Free PDF Page B

visceral excitement which now agitated my every waking hour; I was racked with visions of Oxford in the mists of fall, of pubs and golden yards of foaming ale, of pretty Scottish lasses with that weather-rouged flush on their creamy cheeks, and of myself, winning my honors with a thrilling exegesis of
The Faerie Queene
. But then—Atlanta! Down through the clouds our plane made its descent. And here was an airport—imagine!—about the size of theGreyhound bus station in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and then, a leisurely, halting taxi drive by way of a bumpy two-lane highway through a sleepy Southern city where Peachtree Street was thronged with Negro vendors and the air was still haunted by the ghosts of Sherman's departed legions, and finally, the Atlanta Biltmore, its lobby filled with potted palms, cuspidors and salesmen from as far away as Moultrie and Al-benny.
    There was also something intangibly sinister about the place—something that troubled me even as I went through the check-in proceedings—until at last I realized what the problem was: behind nearly every potted palm, at every portal and exit, there lurked a uniformed fireman. I hope that my memory of this detail does not cast a shadow over the present assembly, but the fire alert was due to a terrible catastrophe that had struck Atlanta only a week before my arrival. In one of the worst fires in Atlanta history—and the greatest conflagration in Georgia since the burning of Atlanta in 1864—the Hotel Winecoff, only a few blocks away, had been destroyed, with the loss of over a hundred lives. The presence at the Biltmore of all this firefighting muscle caused me to seek for a striking metaphor, but I had to settle for the homely and rather imperfect one of the barn door being shut after the horse has run away; so many firemen
should
have allayed certain basic anxieties about nocturnal safety (I'm not exaggerating too much when I say that there seemed to be firemen enough around for one to spend the night with each and every guest), but their presence inexplicably made me
more
nervous, and that night I went to bed in a deep unease, worrying about my interview the next day, and waking hourly to the smell of imagined combustion.
    The next day—the day of the interviews—was nearly interminable, lasting, I recall, from very early in the morning until eight or nine in the evening. During those long hours I had time to sit and fret miserably on one of the couches on the Biltmore mezzanine, to read, to chat with a few of my thirty or so competitors, and in doing so, to take stock of my chances. I felt profoundly intimidated. These young men comprised the intellectual elite—no, the super-elite—of all the colleges and universities of the Southeast; they possessed, I was certain, staggeringly high IQs, had burnt countless gallons of midnight oil to achieve scholastic mastery. They were, in short, the flower of their generation, and win or lose, I was proud to be counted among them. Hooray for Cecil Rhodes! Hooray for Oxford! I thought. The hours dragged on. Even in some of the darkest trials of my officer candidacy in the Marine Corps I did not suffer such suspense, suchspasms of anxiety, such despair mixed with forlorn hope. How sweet it would be, I thought, munching on my ham-and-cheese sandwich, to row for old Balliol, to hit a wicket or swing whatever is swung at cricket for Oriel or All Souls. I thought of the Lake Country, Cornwall, Westminster Abbey. I can recall now nothing of my own interview, only that I seem to have acquitted myself with dignity and aplomb; I think it must have lasted half an hour or more. It was long past dark when, fatigued with the bone-stiffening fatigue that only such miserable waiting can induce, we sat and watched a committee member—himself quite haggard—emerge from the conference room and slowly read the names of the dozen winners. My name was not among them. The relief—no matter how painful the undergirding of