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ver since they were old enough to imagine one, that has been in jeopardy anyway. The absence of personal and social values is to them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-to-day solution. To live seems to them much more crucial than why. Unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such, it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire's reliable old joke: 'If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.' Not content to bemoan his absence, they are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for him on all sides.
3.2, The Beats and religion
Among those beats, the most vulgar or the voidest, all concern about the faith. [9] Living in such depressed society, people can’t keep their character, or speak for themselves, but the beats were exploring perseveringly and painfully. It’s a miserable course, most of them fall into perplexity, contradiction and disappointed, so at this time Buddhism begin to spread among them, it's an attitude of living without any desire, a philosophy of seizing the hour and making merry in time, all that just accord with the declaration of the generation “rebel without goal, persons who agitate without slogan, revolutionary without guiding principle”. Kerouac, who is the typical person, esteems extremely the Chinese monk Hanshan, pursuing an escape from the weary life. In his work On the Road, the leading role’s family name is Paradise ---- Garden of Eden, and the surname is Sal ---- salvation, all present a return of human nature and distillation of spirit.
This Beat Generation is a religious generation.[10]
3.3, My view on the Beat Generation
“For the study of the Beat Generation in China, it can be divided into two periods. The first one, from the magazine of The World Literature on, which published the earliest comment about the Beat Generation, many critics all put this phenomenon as a typical case, the time in China, the beats were attacked and criticized, and their behaviors were all seemed to depart from the classics, can’t be beard in morality. But the second period, with the flouring sorts of ides from philosophy to literature, people expanded their horizon, and renew the old views, began to treat the Beat Generation in different eyes, the bets aren't so bad as before.”[11]
It is understandable the shock that older people feel at the sight of this Beat Generation is, but at its deepest level, not so much repugnance at the facts, as it is distress at the attitudes which move it. Though worried by this distress, they most often argue or legislate in terms of the facts rather than the attitudes. The newspaper reader, studying the eyes of young dope addicts, can only find an outlet for his horror and bewilderment in demands that passers be given the electric chair. Sociologists, with a more academic concern, are just as troubled by the legions of young men whose topmost ambition seems to be to find a secure birth in a monolithic corporation. Contemporary historians express mild surprise at the lack of organized movements, political, religious, or otherwise, among the young. Everywhere people with tidy moralities shake their heads and wonder what is happening to the younger generation.
Perhaps they have not noticed that, behind the excess on the one hand, and the conformity on the other, lies that wait-and-see detachment that results from having to fall back for support more on one's capacity for human endurance than on one's philosophy of life. Not that the Beat Generation is immune to ideas; they fascinate it. Its wars, both past and future, were and will be wars of ideas. It knows, however, that in the final, private moment of conflict a man is really fighting another man, and not an idea. And that the same goes for love. So it is a generation with a greater facility for entertaining ideas than for believing in them. But it is also the first generation in several centuries for which the act of faith has been an obsessive problem, quite aside from the reasons for having a particular faith or not having it. It exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number of facets, a perfect craving to believe. Though it is certainly a generation of extremes, including both the hipster and the radical young Republican in its ranks, it renders unto Caesar (i.e, society) what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. For the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the nightlife, there is no desire to shatter the 'square' society in which he lives, only to elude it. To get on a soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd. Looking at the normal world, where most everything is a 'drag' for him, he nevertheless says: 'Well, that's the Forest of Arden after all. And even jumps if you look at 上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] 下一页
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