You are all a lost generation. Gertrude Stein. In conversation. One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south and turneth about unto the north. It whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. They goeth to the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. Ecclesiastes. Book 1 Chapter 1 Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness. He had felt him being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly's star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed 105 or 205 pounds, but it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn's distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion. I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he had maybe bumped into something as a young child. But I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly. Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn, he had often wondered what had become of him. Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest, at the military school where he prepped for Princeton and played a very good end on the football team. No one had made him race conscious, no one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out