This is a winner, from the most recent Rolling Stone, which features excerpts from an oral history of Hunter S. Thompson. This by William Kennedy:
I remember talking with [Hunter] about an essay by James Baldwin about the writer’s quest for wisdom. Baldwin viewed the generation of American literary giants — Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Faulkner — as looking at the world as “a place to be corrected, and in which innocence is inexplicably lost.” The key phrase for Hunter was Baldwin’s view that “innocence must die, if we are ever to begin that journey toward that greater innocence called wisdom.”
Give all my rending of soul over the loss of novelty and innocence over the past four years, I find great solace in that notion. Bring on the wisdom!
