Word: lovingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...