"…the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party…. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown…. but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 a.m. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back…. Is there something about authorities and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually realizing that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back — which means we’re going to have to be the parents."
     --David Foster Wallace