Fractured Quote: What fortune to be born in such times - ISH

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1

Hi folks - I have what I think is a literary quote I think I kinda sorta remember. From someplace. Maybe.

My memory is far too vague for Prof Google to help with. Wikiquotes is equally useless. So I turn to the actual know-everything oracle of the internet. The one made out of good old fashioned intelligent meat. Y’all folks that is.

I think it came from a Victorian era novel or historical / political work. Mybe something about the French Revolution or at least around that very loose 1750-1850 timeframe. But it might have been an SF story by a significant author.

Yeah, I know that narrows it down a bunch. It’s hell being an older avid reader with a vast memory; eventually all those threads get tangled into un-unravelable (ravelable?) spaghetti.
It goes something like “What good (great?) fortune (luck?) to be born (liv
e?) in times such as this (these times?) (such momentous times?)(etc.)”

The author’s intent is either legitimately admiring, or more likely is ironic or even facetious. Like two French anarchists talking and one saying “Aren’t we lucky to be living through the Terror? Not!”

The sense I think I best remember is more like a sober historian narrator tsk tsking at the impassioned enthusiasm of the revolutionaries naively calling their nihilist wreckage the best of times.

It was pretty lyrical which I why I remember it.
Anyone care to take a stab at this one? Thanks in advance.

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It’s nagging me now. An obvious possibility is Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”), or the supposed Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”.

But I’ve got a vague feeling I have heard this somewhere myself more or less as you have it…

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Jules Verne, maybe.

Or the current version is ‘what a time to be alive’, from The Simpson’s I believe.

4

Jasper, temporarily frozen in the Kwikee Mart freezer, is thawed out, and thinks he’s in the far future, and then …

5

Isn’t it just an inverting of, “O tempora, o mores”?

6

Sounds like “O brave new world, that has such people in’t!"

This is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Aldous Huxley used it as the title of his novel, Brave New World, but in an ironic sense.

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It wasn’t either of those. And that vague nagging feeling is where I’ve been stuck for about 6 months.

This morning it resonates more as a young person expressing unwitting hubris at his role in the momentous changes his movement is wreaking upon the world. IOW the sense is “How fortunate I am to be here at the heyday of our Glorious Movement, remaking all of society in our image. What great leverage we have. This is a worthy task for people as great as we are, and me specifically.”

But again it’s one short neat pithy sentence. All the rest of the connotations are in the surrounding text.

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That’s good. We may be closing on it. Thank you!

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Could it be:

 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
 But to be young was very heaven!

William Wordsworth, The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement

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It’s not quite as simple as I recall, but by George, it certainly fits everything else. I think we have a winner.

Thank you good Sir! To where do I ship the Scotch?

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Um, my place!

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I think you’re thinking of Wordsworth on the French Revolution:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww285.html

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Thanks for the link! See post #9 above. :slight_smile: