"Heavens, Mary, we'll laugh again....It's just that we'll never be young again."
For indivduals as for epochs the process of aging is normally a quiet and gradual affair, but the realization of youth having passed comes often as not with a suddenness, even a shock. Most of us, I suspect, mark that moment well and often thereafter in idle passages find ourselves touching the wound it left. My moment, and that of many like me, came with the death of Kennedy, and along with the others, I knew it. About the third day of that long, terrible time Mary McGrory said to me, "We'll never laugh again." And I answered, "Heavens, Mary, we'll laugh again. It's just that we'll never be young again." And I really knew that: knew it in recesses of the mind from which memories rarely return save in just such moments. I found myself at one point before a television camera being asked by a gentle and thoughtful Negro journalist did I think the dreams of the New Frontier would ever be realized, and I replied, thinking of nothing, and looking nowhere, that I was reminded of the passage from the Tempest, "We are such stuff as dreams are made of," and asked did he recall that that passage began with the words, "Our revels now are ended." Which was all I had to say. My mind for the moment stopped, and it was only weeks later, seeing a transcript of what I had said, that I realized I did not in fact know how Prospero began that soliloquy. Not fortune, nor pain, nor yet the fiercest will could have wrung it from me. Only the realization of a youth having passed summoned it forth, which is to say summoned a power that was there but was not being used.
Daniel P. Moynihan
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/11/4/moynihan-assesses-the-role-of-architecture/
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