Excerpt from Quad, Vol. 3: A Quarterly Review of Student Thinking at Birmingham-Southern College; August, 1942 So it is in sympathy with these aims and with the offering of a humble voice for their promotion that I come back when the editors of Quad tell me that a contribution will be accepted. Those of us who are young live for the future. Somewhere in the years before we entered college we began to realize the inadequacy of childhood and the things it meant and held for us. That realization was accompanied by several sorts of objections to leaving a state of existence that was for the most part comfortable and secure, but most of us, when we finally knew that there was no going back, became at first inordinately eager to get on with the life of an adult being. And along with that eagerness to go ahead came the shocking knowledge that discomfort and insecurity were the major characteristics of this new life. We are seized with an impatience, and most of the time we are forgetful of the moments of happiness and the areas of comfort that make the apparent chaos more than bearable and even challenging. That impatience manifests itself sometimes in such disrespect for the older people who are running things that it would have to be called utter rudeness were not ignor ance and lack of experience its cause. Of course, sometimes the older people are guilty of most of what impetuous youth accuses it. The young men now face the lonely and poisonous sands of the Solomons, the young men who are thrown into the burning hell around torpedoed tankers, the young men stung to death with a white hot incendiary at a bleak feet, the young violinist breaking his precious hands pushing a jeep out of mud - are they merely rude when they ask, if they ask, Why didn't you make some decent arrangement in 1919? Why did you return to a farm in Tennessee, a suburban home in Westchester, with your back to a Europe still cancerous? Why did you buy the automobiles, the radios, drink Scotch whiskey in speakeasies - the fruits of an economy temporarily pegged to lending a hurt and desperate Germany money to rearm? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.