What goes through my mind, every now and again, is the Joan Didion piece about being a child of the 50s, though that's not, I don't think, the way she put it - about making a private peace, a little town, a house by the beach, rather than cutting oneself into history; about not going to the barricades. (It was "The Morning After the Sixties", or a title much like.)
That and Lyra and the aleiometer in Phillip Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy - not by grace but by learning.