War & Peace Quote by Martin Lewis Perl

Calling the Depression and World War II "good fortune" sounds like a provocation, and Perl knows it. The line works because it flips the expected moral accounting: hardship is supposed to be tragedy, not luck. Yet the phrase "to be a child" is doing quiet rhetorical labor. Children experience catastrophe at a slant. They absorb rationing, uncertainty, and adult anxiety as atmosphere rather than agenda. Perl’s point isn’t that poverty or war are desirable; it’s that the timing of suffering can shape a person without crushing them.

The second hinge is "a youth during the war years". Youth is when identities harden into habits. Wartime culture prized competence, improvisation, and collective problem-solving, and it made science feel consequential in a way peacetime rarely does. For a future physicist, those years offered a blunt lesson: the world can change overnight, institutions can mobilize, and technical knowledge can become destiny. That’s not romanticism so much as an origin story for a certain mid-century scientific temperament - pragmatic, disciplined, suspicious of waste, and allergic to entitlement.

There’s subtext, too, about generational advantage. Perl’s cohort endured scarcity early, then entered an America that emerged globally dominant, with expanding universities, federal research money, and a cultural halo around scientists. "Good fortune" names that arc: formed by austerity, launched into opportunity. It’s a personal memoir compressed into a single, slightly barbed sentence - gratitude without sentimentality, pride without claiming innocence.