The moral claim (3)

But couldn't we tell a story that supports Cowen's moral claim? A story about someone who embraced the big quest, or lived among people who did, and came to see that it was better to just accept her mess. In fact you could and, not surprisingly, it's already been done. Often! The late 1970s and 1980s were a minefield of such stories as people who'd been part of the new left came to realize that their "revolution" was just a passing phase.

Here is one of the better-written examples of such a story, The White Album by Joan Didion. It tells a story with a moral very similar to the one Cowen wants us to draw. Read her first paragraph, and you will geta very familiar feeling (or a very familiar "vibe" like they used to say back in the day). It came out the year that Cowen was 17 and I was 19. Our "revolution" was just beginning.