The Year That Trembled

The Film | The Year May 1970 - May 1971 | News & Updates | TYTT Store

The Year 1970-1971

Excerpt from Chapter One, Meadow, from the novel, The Year That Trembled, by Scott Lax

None of us laughed at Helen. Maybe because in 1970 we listened more to new ideas, however sentimental or foolish they sound all these years later in the harsh light of the millenniums end. We wanted to find new answers for old questions, or we just thought there were new answers. And even with the death that came daily, the death that would come to our gathering in the meadow, life in American felt as if it were being recast, reshaped, even redeemed by some transcendent thing.
What the thing was we debated long and loud: God, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, the perfect meditative self. Or drugs, for some. Or those things which fueled the passions of so many bewildered wartime youth: the idea of peace; our music; love in all its base and sublime forms.
Music, rebellious, romantic, filled with anger and anesthetic, nourished us in the days when a boy might find himself standing, not in a meadow, but in a burning jungle in Southeast Asia, the memory of high school graduation as recent as the ending of the baseball season.

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