(The following speech was delivered to the Alumni Dinner of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, held in New York City November 1, 1967.)

For indivduals as for epochs the process of aging is normally a quiet and gradual affair, but the realization of youth having passed comes often as not with a suddenness, even a shock. Most of us, I suspect, mark that moment well and often thereafter in idle passages find ourselves touching the wound it left. My moment, and that of many like me, came with the death of Kennedy, and along with the others, I knew it. About the third day of that long, terrible time Mary McGrory said to me, "We'll never laugh again." And I answered, "Heavens, Mary, we'll laugh again. It's just that we'll never be young again." And I really knew that: knew it in recesses of the mind from which memories rarely return save in just such moments. I found myself at one point before a television camera being asked by a gentle and thoughtful Negro journalist did I think the dreams of the New Frontier would ever be realized, and I replied, thinking of nothing, and looking nowhere, that I was reminded of the passage from the Tempest, "We are such stuff as dreams are made of," and asked did he recall that that passage began with the words, "Our revels now are ended." Which was all I had to say. My mind for the moment stopped, and it was only weeks later, seeing a transcript of what I had said, that I realized I did not in fact know how Prospero began that soliloquy. Not fortune, nor pain, nor yet the fiercest will could have wrung it from me. Only the realization of a youth having passed summoned it forth, which is to say summoned a power that was there but was not being used.

I would like to argue that something of this sort may be happening in the nation at this time. Nothing is more clear than that a certain kind of youthfulness has now passed us. Strangely, it has done so in a time dimension surprisingly human, if not indeed mortal. What has been called, and properly, the American epoch began -- what? -- say thirty years ago when it developed that Europe had lost control over events, and would descend into destruction, impotence and ruin. Thereafter, America would dominate, and for a time command events. And this was so whether we would have it such or not. The fact of American might resided to be sure in its weapons and its wealth: matters to some degree under our control, the results more or less of deliberate decision. But in a far more fundamental way our power was ideological. We were what the world wanted to be like, and never more so than when denouncing the cultural imperialism that jammed the shops and bazaars of the world with American products, filled the air with American music, packed the theatres for American films, the libraries with American books, and increasingly, and not least importantly, the cities with American buildings, surrounded to be sure with American automobiles. This is not over. On the contrary, I would think it only begun in terms of how much further it is likely to go, and how much longer it is likely to go on. It is America, not the world, that has changed. Of a sudden the American Epoch is no longer young. The ease and assurance of youth is gone: the certainty that there will always be another girl, a new opportunity, plenty of energy, plenty of time, and most of all the careless, even at times cruel confidence that it will all work out.

Well, of course, it hasn't. Life has caught up with us as it will with all men, and all peoples. We collide with the realization that things do not always work out, that time is short, energies limited and overextended, options so much more restricted than we had supposed. We have entered a time of trouble, and are young no more.

What hurts so, what is resisted, is the idea that it has come too soon, that our time has been cut short, that our revels, too, are ended. But that only argues more convincingly the case that indeed a period has come to a close.

There is no pleasure to be had in reciting the specifics, and no need either, as they are all too manifest. The idea of a great society has turned from something noble to something that somehow disappoints, and without even the dignity to cease trying to charm. The Negro revolution, once the very embodiment of our dignity and pride, has somehow fallen into the bonds of what the President has rightly called vulgar men, half educated in their utterances, and wholly sincere only in their destructiveness. Worst of all, the great dream of internationalism, the splendid succession of noble deeds and magnanimous gestures that marked the course of American foreign policy--or so we thought, and so surely we intended through the three decades just passed--has degenerated into the nightmare of Vietnam where alone and adamant we persist in a course of destruction as certain of our own virtue as the world is of our madness. And meanwhile, one after another group appears to be withdrawing its consent from the understandings and agreements that have made us one of the most stable democracies in the history of the world. Right and left the conviction of conspiracy mounts, and with it a burgeoning impulse to violence at home as well as abroad. Those of us caught in between, increasingly deprived of self assurance, begin to know the taste of self contempt, and think back to Yeats and the fore-knowledge of this moment:

Turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

What is to be done, as another man asked in a not too different time at the beginning of this century. The failure of nerve among many elements in American society is already evident enough: a retreat into privatism or worse, a surrender to nihilism, the politics, if you will, of Peter Pan, of boys who will not grow up. And it is not good enough. The end of youth is not the end of life, much less the end of the world. It is, or ought to mark the onset of a period of less fun, no doubt, but far more satisfaction and much greater consequence. Poets do their best work young, philosophers late. Nations, I would argue, do it in the middle years, and these are now upon us in America, and it should be with a sense of expectation rather than dread that we greet them. I will argue further that properly used, this could be a time of great expectation. Some years ago the French Dominican, Father Bruckberger declared in the sensitive translation of Gouveneur Paulding that, "Either America is the hope of the world, or it is nothing." I believe that still to be so, and further that that hope is better grounded today than ever before for the very reason that we are being forced to see what threatens us, and being so, forces are vastly more likely to preserve those qualities and strengths which are indeed the hope of mankind.