Sir, - How encouraging to hear John Banville, (The Irish Times, August 24th) from one's own generation, choose "That Summer" of 1968 when so many of us learnt "a new version of what it was to be alive"!
Hindsight must always involve a sense of reliving, as in a dream. But it was not a dream at the time. The youth were alive, because they were active and seized the initiative in events. No hindsight can alter the impact that youth had in changing the shape of things in 1968.
But who from those days, however heady a dreamer, could have envisaged the advances that have been made in Ireland and on the world scale to date? Did we really think we would live to see the day when the case for a united Ireland seems not only increasingly unanswerable but an inevitability; when Scotland and Wales had opted for devolution and the United Kingdom as a state looks headed towards a (typically) mannerly but grudging dissolution? Could we imagine then in our wildest dreams that the travesty of socialist imperialism in the Soviet Union would by now become a thing of the past?
Is this present actually worse than that past, as John Banville seems to conclude? If the middle-aged are not to degenerate into the maudlin, we must achieve at least the wisdom of age that nothing in real life ever turns out quite how we hoped or expected. The collapse of the old order such as the bipolar system - for collapsed it has - would no doubt have better been replaced by something more unifying and positive than chaos. But still the reality has changed and that reality offers more possibilities than that old rigid `balance of terror' for shifting the status quo now and in the future than any of our past dreams, if we are prepared to look out for them. True, there have been disasters along the way and even just over a week ago the worst single disaster of all in Omagh, not to mention the countless wars and tragedies on the world scale. But cannot that be the last such disaster in Ireland, even if we do not have the power to make it so for the whole world?
No one ever expected anything of the so-called "privileged" youth of the 1960s at the time, if I remember right. But that was the point we surprised them all. John Banville might reflect on the hidden possibilities now that he seems to be resigning himself to expect nothing of today. - Yours, etc., Rod Eley,
O'Connell Avenue,
Phibsboro,
Dublin 7.