When I was younger, I imagined people my age now to have a rigid mentality, and to be incapable of thinking new things.
Now, though, I think of younger people as (relatively) rigid, unnuanced in their thinking. With the decades comes a certain relativism--you know things will change, categories are not fixed. There is also one's relation to several past selves--one has been several other people, people who are oneself, but also, somehow, not. I can read Vonnegut, something I thought was great when I was 15, and still identify with the 15 year old in my admiration, with no condescension, but also realize I wouldn't respond to it now in the same way. I came to these ideas reading a biography of Ornette that I bought and left accidentally in my brother's house, where I am visiting again this weekend. I have had different relations to Ornette's music over the year, to the point of not being in the "mood" for listening for a decade at a time at one point.
Aging is decline, at a certain point, but that is really more of a late aging process. The 60s and 70s are still a time of growth.
1 comment:
Confucius said the Great Learning is rooted in "watching with affection the way people grow". I think young people sometimes experience my affection as condescension, which would explain why they think I've just got my mind made up, rigid.
The truth is that I don't take their ideas of the moment too seriously because I know, from personal experience, that they'll change, and that their being (for lack of a better word) wrong at this stage isn't going to kill them.
Borges said that "our opinions are the most trivial things about us". It's true that I think that the opinions young people hold aren't the most important things about them. They mean a lot to them though.
Tom Petty said, "Might mean something to you; it ain't nothing to me. But when you dance..."
Post a Comment