Word: yesteryears
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...SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR...
...evocative stage props and period business. Memory is another matter. Remembering truthfully is as difficult as inventing well -- indeed, more so; hence the paucity of good memoirs. "You must never undertake the search for time lost," warns the last sentence of Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear, "in the spirit of nostalgic tourism." The rest of the book shows how carefully he has obeyed this precept...
American readers know Rezzori mainly for two richly convoluted memory novels of Europe before and after World War II, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1981) and The Death of My Brother Abel (1985). The Snows of Yesteryear looks back before their time frame, to the childhood and, implicitly, the formation of a writer. It leads into a world now irretrievably lost, its values blown away by World War I and its fortunes wrecked by the inflationary '20s -- "For the class to which my parents belonged . . . a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation...
...dynamism that many thought had long deserted the Old World. Look at London's vast Docklands, where a reborn city with elegant housing and sleek office buildings is rising from what was once a wasteland of derelict wharves and warehouses, the relics of Britain's mighty trading empire of yesteryear. Boats rush commuters up the Thames to the City, London's financial heartland and center of the world's freewheeling foreign-exchange market...
...stand, a bit belatedly, to concede my guilt in contributing in a small way to the drug crisis. Maybe the '60s were a mistake, maybe I too frequently condoned the self-destructive behavior of others, maybe I was obtuse in not seeing a linkage between the marijuana of yesteryear and the crack of today. I hope that this admission, which does not come easily, will animate my behavior. But while I am willing to shoulder some of the blame on behalf of my generation, I trust that the other equally respectable co-conspirators in America's two-faced...