So the months went by. The sad teachers were forced to live on their salaries again, now badly slashed, and try to pay back what they’d borrowed. And somewhere, some big malevolent hand took hold of the affairs of men and squeezed the juice clear out of our lives.
We went on learning French irregular verbs, and all about the Peloponnesian War, and the binomial theorem, and the Odes of Horace. But we studied nothing about how to hang onto the icy top of a swaying freight car; how to lick the boots of a possible employer so that he might condescend to give us jobs at six bucks a week; how to approach a prosperous mark on the street for a handout. These things we didn’t learn. Nor did we learn how to cope with malice and bigotry and hate, and the big lies that were to be the hallmark of the decade which was coming up. We didn’t know, when they passed out the sealed examination papers in June of 1930, that the world was about to take a belly-flop from which it would never recover.
The good days were gone, not only the care-filled days of childhood and the mixed-up days of adolescence. Not only the naive, self-deluding time of post-war idealism, but all the old times. We were entering the grim time. The time when you’d better know which side you’re on, brother. The time of the tough demagogues, and the wishful thinkers. The electronic age was about to begin, when only a handful of people in the whole world would really know what was going on. Brinksmanship was here.
Thus did we, and the world, leave behind our childhood.
Never Sleep Three in a Bed Page 21