In a jiffy of the present-day changes,
The intellectual youth of the world grow up
Without watching the reaction of their parents.
Where their fathers imbibed the doctrines
Of Old Schools and learned the Classics and
Revolted against them, not to spare themselves,
Today’s young people have been battered
By many extraordinary trends of the new times.

They have been taught something of arts,
Something of science, something of myth,
Something of atheism, something of religion,
Something of business, something of free love,
Something of philosophy, something of economy,
Something of militarism, something of everything.
In the midst of the sturdy epoch of postmodernism
The masses of young intellectuals have been taught
The most extreme of every culture, from A to Zero.

But what is at home is the best. Intellectually,
They have been forced to the same great omissions
That the world has made after the world war (WWII).
Physically, they have skipped, figuratively speaking,
From the period of the ruined cities, unimproved roads,
And the massive destruction all over the burnt old world
To the spacewalk of space age. The omission is too great.

The mind could not compensate for it; the spirit is lost
In the conflict. The first result, therefore, of the gap
Is undoubtedly to produce a class of young intellectuals,
Both young men and young women, but chiefly men,
Who frankly do not know how to live in their own skin
Or in the age in which their own countries still dwell.
They are for the most part educated abroad,
Where they forget the realities of their own sort.