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Revisiting the 70s as an older man’s academic exercise rather than a personal memoir of his younger self as a student invites conflicting sentiments. Charles Dickens’ “it was the best of times and the worst of times” may very well be a tired cliché yet it still seems to capture the era’s profound contradictions. Even as a kid coming of age in the northern Minnesota city of Duluth, I was keenly aware of a stubborn competition between intense spiritual yearnings and an equally insatiable craving for carnal delights. Only dimly did I perceive that personal battle playing out on the much larger stage of the era’s zeitgeist.
Revisiting the 70s as an older man’s academic exercise rather than a personal memoir of his younger self as a student invites conflicting sentiments. Charles Dickens’ “it was the best of times and the worst of times” may very well be a tired cliché yet it still seems to capture the era’s profound contradictions. Even as a kid coming of age in the northern Minnesota city of Duluth, I was keenly aware of a stubborn competition between intense spiritual yearnings and an equally insatiable craving for carnal delights. Only dimly did I perceive that personal battle playing out on the much larger stage of the era’s zeitgeist.