remark which offered none of those present any handle to catch on to.
At this meeting there was a very distinguished German lady philosopher, with whom I went out afterward for a coffee. She punctured euphoria. What she noticed, she said, in all these discussions, was that they consisted of people saying things as though for the first time, and as though they had no continuity with anything said before or to be said after. Moreover what was said came out of ideas we had all read in books anyway, or were ideas snatched from the intellectual atmosphere. She said she thought the real problem was not that the young wanted to have no contact with the old but that, precisely, they lacked contact with truly adult minds. The teachers and older people with whom they had to deal were in fact mentally adolescent. She attributed a good many of the student’s attitudes to a shallow nihilism which had been the fashion for a long while. She wondered whether the university had not already been destroyed, and whetherit would recover. A university was to her mind not a place where there were only the best teachers but where there were values so pervasive that even an inferior teacher could fit in without letting the standard down.
ANTI-CLIMAX
Journalism inevitably falsifies by concentrating on the scene and the subject, in a situation where what is most significant may be not the scene and not the subject. More important probably than the happenings which I have been describing in Paris in the spring were the non-happenings. Walk a few hundred yards away from one area of the
Quartier Latin
and despite the strikes and the students there was a remarkably normal atmosphere. One way of describing it would be to say that it was like an over-long rather restrained holiday, with well-dressed people strolling on the sidewalks, the cafés crowded, the food in restaurants up to its usual standard, and many small shops open. Most foreign tourists, it is true, had gone away, but then Parisians, having nothing else to do, were touring their own city, including the Sorbonne in which the actors were inextricably mixed up with the spectators. The only people who seemed to be notably suffering from shortages (of their clientèle) were the male tarts. I asked one of them what he thought of “
les étudiants
” and he shrieked, with an extraordinary gesture—“
Scandaleux!
”
Dust and dirt from ungathered rubbish exhaled a vague smog, a halo over the streets like old varnish over a new green painting, but the presence of these odors was largely compensated for by the absence of petrol. One had to walk long distances but this was good for health and not much slower than going by car when there is traffic.
The spring itself reasserted what was so much more apparent thanthe revolutionary situation—the non-revolutionary one. In fact, if there were going to be a revolution, it would be—everyone I think agreed—against the evidence of one’s senses which lay down certain external rules for revolutions. The weather, of course, can be contradictory, but it is difficult to think of a revolution taking place when—in daylight at all events—everyone looks particularly good humored. For the result of the explosion of talk in Paris this May was that most people looked more self-complacent—even friendly—than they have done in Paris for years.
Yet there was that ugly evening which happened after De Gaulle’s second speech in which he adroitly substituted for the referendum he had so mistakenly offered in his first speech a referendum under a more resounding name—a General Election. He accompanied this gesture with the release of a flood of gasoline upon which came floating in their automobiles a flood of
Gaullistes
. They came joyously claxoning up the boulevards, hooting at one another, hooting to urge others to hoot, stopping their cars suddenly, getting out to embrace some fellow driver or passenger, in their chic clothes and their makeup, their
At this meeting there was a very distinguished German lady philosopher, with whom I went out afterward for a coffee. She punctured euphoria. What she noticed, she said, in all these discussions, was that they consisted of people saying things as though for the first time, and as though they had no continuity with anything said before or to be said after. Moreover what was said came out of ideas we had all read in books anyway, or were ideas snatched from the intellectual atmosphere. She said she thought the real problem was not that the young wanted to have no contact with the old but that, precisely, they lacked contact with truly adult minds. The teachers and older people with whom they had to deal were in fact mentally adolescent. She attributed a good many of the student’s attitudes to a shallow nihilism which had been the fashion for a long while. She wondered whether the university had not already been destroyed, and whetherit would recover. A university was to her mind not a place where there were only the best teachers but where there were values so pervasive that even an inferior teacher could fit in without letting the standard down.
ANTI-CLIMAX
Journalism inevitably falsifies by concentrating on the scene and the subject, in a situation where what is most significant may be not the scene and not the subject. More important probably than the happenings which I have been describing in Paris in the spring were the non-happenings. Walk a few hundred yards away from one area of the
Quartier Latin
and despite the strikes and the students there was a remarkably normal atmosphere. One way of describing it would be to say that it was like an over-long rather restrained holiday, with well-dressed people strolling on the sidewalks, the cafés crowded, the food in restaurants up to its usual standard, and many small shops open. Most foreign tourists, it is true, had gone away, but then Parisians, having nothing else to do, were touring their own city, including the Sorbonne in which the actors were inextricably mixed up with the spectators. The only people who seemed to be notably suffering from shortages (of their clientèle) were the male tarts. I asked one of them what he thought of “
les étudiants
” and he shrieked, with an extraordinary gesture—“
Scandaleux!
”
Dust and dirt from ungathered rubbish exhaled a vague smog, a halo over the streets like old varnish over a new green painting, but the presence of these odors was largely compensated for by the absence of petrol. One had to walk long distances but this was good for health and not much slower than going by car when there is traffic.
The spring itself reasserted what was so much more apparent thanthe revolutionary situation—the non-revolutionary one. In fact, if there were going to be a revolution, it would be—everyone I think agreed—against the evidence of one’s senses which lay down certain external rules for revolutions. The weather, of course, can be contradictory, but it is difficult to think of a revolution taking place when—in daylight at all events—everyone looks particularly good humored. For the result of the explosion of talk in Paris this May was that most people looked more self-complacent—even friendly—than they have done in Paris for years.
Yet there was that ugly evening which happened after De Gaulle’s second speech in which he adroitly substituted for the referendum he had so mistakenly offered in his first speech a referendum under a more resounding name—a General Election. He accompanied this gesture with the release of a flood of gasoline upon which came floating in their automobiles a flood of
Gaullistes
. They came joyously claxoning up the boulevards, hooting at one another, hooting to urge others to hoot, stopping their cars suddenly, getting out to embrace some fellow driver or passenger, in their chic clothes and their makeup, their
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