Adolescent Opinion

I am glad if I have been a comfort to you and mama and only wish that I had also been a comfort to my self; but I haven’t.  I have lived 19 years yet it seems to me that I have wasted them.  I amount to very little more than when I was a baby.  Even in games I have never been a great success.  I am fare in every thing but good in nothing.  It seems to me that for a person to amount to some thing they should be good at least in one thing.  Other boys appear to make successes but though [I] want to I don’t succeed.  Perhaps it is just that I lack that small fraction of courage, will power, or what ever it is which makes them succeed.  Or perhaps I don’t fail any worse than any one else only my jealousy makes me think I do.  Still when I look at even my class mates I don’t feel that sense of superiority which it seems to me should be felt by a (not great) but by a successful man.  I some times fear that I am one of these darned dreamers with a willing spirit but a weak flesh a man who is always going to succeed but who never does.  Should I be such a one it would have been far more merciful had I died ten years ago for I at least can imaging no more infernal hell than to be forced to live — a failure.
—    Cadet George S. Patton, Jr.
From a letter to his father, dated 12 November 1904
Originally found in the book:  “The Patton Papers“
Compiled and Edited by:  Martin Blumenson
[How critical youth can be of itself…  It should be noted that General George S. Patton, Jr. ended up being one of the most accomplished American combat generals of World War II.   —    kmab]
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On This Day In:
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2018	Take Care Of Me…
2017	Make Some Difference
2016	Still 99%
2015	Adolescent Opinion
2014	In A Big World
2013	Vacancy For God
2012	Sweat Equity
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2011	Still Incomplete
2010	Happy New Year – 2010

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In My Own Vanity

When you get this letter, it will have been just a little over a year… since I started to learn the profession of killing my brothers…  And in this year of contact with the world my respect for man has dwindled instead of increasing.  For even among the best and the best are I take it those who devote them selves to the service of Mars, there is not the self sacrificing love of fame or self denying selfishness which I feel and which I had expected in others but rather a languid lassitude careless indifference or hazy uncertainty not becoming in my estimation a soldier or a man.  But let this be:  the fewer of a species there are the greater is its individual worth.  And if my nature prove incapable of the task I have set myself or if the opportunity never comes I can at least die happy in my own vanity knowing that I stood alone and that alone I fell.
—    [then] Cadet George S. Patton, Jr.
From:  “The Patton Papers“
Written by:  Martin Blumenson
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On This Day In:
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2016	Feeling Warm Yet?
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2015	Just Like All The Others
2014	In My Own Vanity
2013	Filled With Words
2012	Lectio Auget Existentiae Meae
2011	Lied Lately?
2010	Born To Work At Faux News
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