"I met the author Dick Francis at the Kentucky Derby years ago. I knew he had been a champion rider in steeplechases. I said he was a bigger man than I had expected. He replied that it took a big man to "hold a horse together" in a steeplechase. This image of his remained in the forefront of my memory so long, I think, because life itself can seem a lot like that: a matter of holding one's self-respect together, instead of a horse, as one's self-respect is expected to hurdle fences and hedges and water.

My dear thirteen-year old daughter Lily, having become a pretty adolescent, appears to me, as do most American adolescents, to be holding her self-respect together the best she can in a really scary steeplechase.

I said to the new graduates at Butler University, not much older than Lily, that they were being called Generation X, two clicks from the end, but that they were as much Generation A as Adam and Even had been. What malarkey!

Esprit de l'escalier! Better late than never! Only at this very moment in 1996 as I am about to write the next sentence, have I realized how meaningless the image of a Garden of Eden must have been to my young audience, since the world was so densely populated with other secretly frightened people, and so overplanted and rigged with both natural and manmade booby traps.

The next sentence: I should have told them they were like Dick Francis when Dick Francis was young, and astride an animal full of pride and panic, in the starting gate for a steeplechase."

Kurt Vonnegut, "Timequake" (1997)