Reading, with guilty complacence and narcissistic fascination, François Ricard's la Génération Lyrique. What he said. That's me, and my friends, and my generation, to the life. That is how we all were. And are. Just so, we were aware of ourselves, and of one another, in exactly the way that Ricard describes us; and we were, as he says, at the same time individually and collectively, extatically and exultantly, conscious of our privilege, our beauty, our charm (half arrogance, half angelic grace), and of our intellectual and cultural supremacy--and determined, with an astonishingly aristocratic steeliness of resolve, not to lose a jot or tittle of the perquisites or the joys and pleasures of our superior rank. I'm sorry, we sound like monsters--but we were beautiful, kind, and gracious. And for us, as for no other generation, sex had no connotation of disease or death.