Once there were nice people: brave, daring, reckless. Would you call it romanticism in a way? Probably. But the point was that lots of people have wasted themselves. The majority of them. The other half of them simply lost their common sense and sensitivity. Have become somewhat rude, and too reserved, and too inattentive towards each other’s problems – both physical health and mental state.
The most frequently repeated words (in fact, the dominating ones) have become “have a drink.”1 That was the basic value, defining people who have been at war and came from it – crippled both mentally and physically, unable and unwilling to change anything. Having fun, tramping all through the country and Europe, watching bullfights, spending nights with the girls and days with alcoholics, those people were called the lost ones. They belonged to the “lost generation”. Really, there were so many of them like Robert Cohn, Mike Campbell and Lady Brett Ashley who were constantly searching for fun and never realizing the real purpose of their useless lives. If not knowing Robert Cohn closer, one could even think about philosophy that his following words contain: “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize that you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”…
