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Good morning. My youngest grandson has just started at university and I had a cheerful e-mail from him this week. He says he is making friends, playing sport and even acting in a play. He is clearly enjoying himself. Sadly, this is not the case with all students. The universities regulator said a couple of days ago that “It is impossible not to be concerned at the scale and seriousness of distress, anxiety and depression among students.” Recently I read a couple of highly praised novels by Sally Rooney, a young Irish writer who has been acclaimed as the voice of this new generation. The world which she depicts seems to have no shared values, few boundaries and a fair amount of nastiness to one another. What holds the reader however is a search amongst the central characters for what is real; what is true in themselves and authentic in other people on the basis of which a genuine friendship might be based. In a world in which so many are just trying to make an impression they are looking for something solid to hold onto. This desire for the authentic is not, I think, enough by itself to hold a community together, whether a group of students or a society, but it is a very good, indeed essential starting point. These novels also made me wonder however if this world is so very different from the world of young people in the past and they brought to mind that 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye, which still sells more than a million copies a year. The central character, this time a teenager, Holden Caulfield, is in a state of permanent mental revolt against the adult world because of what he judges to be its phoniness; its pretenses and falsehoods. There is one particularly powerful scene when he reacts to the singing of a carol in the school’s glitzy Christmas show with the words. “Old Jesus would’ve puked”. Then he goes on to observe that what Jesus would really have liked was the drummer in the orchestra. He only has a chance to bang them a couple of times in a piece but when he does so he is absorbed in what he is doing and he has this shy, nervous expression on his face. In a phony world Holden Caulfield sees something genuine here, and, he thinks, this is what Jesus would have liked. This means, for me, first of all trying to honest with oneself, identifying what is real, what is genuine , including those vulnerabilities which are part of all of us. And for those who have faith it will mean trying to do this before God.