Wallace Stegner - We have been cut off, the past has been ended...

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [..]My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.