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Rita Iton Posts: 325 Joined: 28th Jun 2009 Location: USA | quotePosted at 17:49 on 5th July 2009 Essay on Listening To The Younger. “ You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly supposeThat your eye was steady as ever;Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose-What made you so awfully clever?” I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”Said his father “Don’t give yourself airs!Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?Be off, or I’ll kick you down-stairs!” Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Father William was right: if the young are asking too many questions, there’s an unexpressed motive somewhere. They sometimes want to console the rapidly aging, but when the young ask advice or information they are playing either sycophant or an assigned role in a scrip designed by someone else.The young of course, assume-due, I fear, to the unfortunate inclinations of some of us in our later years –which we are dying to tell them endlessly about our experiences, and about the light these experiences throw on the mistakes customary to youth, and particularly in the youth we are addressing. The secret however, of successful-and therefore continuing-association with the young lies in knowing that they are more valuable as suppliers of intelligence than receivers of it. Nor is getting them to inform us a difficult task. As Marilyn French described it in My Summer With George.One really charming quality of the narcissistic younger generation is their distractibility; you can easily deflect any unwanted attention they may direct at you simply by asking them about themselves.Although the old, as we are daily warned, are growing in numbers while the population of the young yearly declines, it is the young who influence the world we live in.Without my children and my friends ten years younger and counting. I would be probably living in a state of sad self-satisfaction, ignorant of much that is happening around me. Not about politics, which one can follow readily, but the feel of life, its beat as it sounds each day. Lionel Trilling, speaking of what he called “manners” put this so well that I must let him say it for me: What I understand by manners is a culture’s hum and buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by…. tone, gesture, emphasis or rhythm, sometimes by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special meaning.It is precisely this that we ought to pick up from the young. To try and stay sufficiently au courant to know it all is difficult, tedious, and affected. Our deepest feelings are, I think, in a different place. But to cut the hum and buzz completely from our consciousness, dismissing it with a tired or, worse, critical gesture, is to cut us off from our culture and the delightful sense of, however superficially, learning something new while regarding it with that peaceful (but never complacent) distance age provides.Most of my young friends are smarter than I am. They sometimes argue with me about this, which is kind of them and I appreciate it, but the young being smarter—which is not to say wiser--- is the whole point. One of the dangers inherent in friendships among the old is that they are no smarter now than they ever were; one usually knows them all too well, and vice versa. In Virginia Wolf’s To The Lighthouse Mr. Bankers, regretting what has become of his relationship to Mr. Ramsay, thinks; “What with one thing and another, the pulp had gone out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say, only after a time, repetition had taken the place of newness. It was to repeat that they met. “With those who are younger one is much less likely to repeat So if those who are younger talk, and those who are older listen, and if, as I believe, the young like to talk to or anyway” at” those older, for the very same satisfaction the difference in generations offers each, isn’t it pretty much a one-way street? Do we who are getting on serve only to listen to the young? Have we nothing to tell them that are worth their hearing, even if they may feel a little bored hearing it? I do not mean that we sit silent and judgmental, like doctrinaire Freudian analysts; we speak we respond, we question.But as I have pondered this for a while I came only recently to understand that it is our very presence that is important to the young. They want us to be there; not in their homes, perhaps, not watching them with a baleful eye as they go about their daily work, but there.We reassure them that life continues, and if we listen, we assure them that it matters to us that it continues.If we do not tiresomely insist that the past was better, that the present is without morals or good habits or healthy living or (heaven help us) family values, whatever they are; if we do not recount adventures in the past, even if requested to do so, then the young will sometimes actually seek---- they will not openly ask---for something we are equipped to give them.What to call it? It is assurance that most disasters pass, it is the survival of deprivation and death and rejection that renders our sympathy of value.Like lovers parting in wartime, who may never meet again or know each other if they do, we who grow old can taste the biting edge of passion’s anticipated annulment, and savor it as the young cannot. But I believe the young perceive what we cannot tell them. |
Ron Brind Posts: 19041 Joined: 26th Oct 2003 Location: England | quotePosted at 19:20 on 5th July 2009 Thanks for that Rita and having read it through I feel I am almost cheating you by saying simply......how true! Well done!! |
Stephanie Jackson Posts: 3911 Joined: 13th Apr 2008 Location: UK | quotePosted at 20:31 on 5th July 2009 Great piece of work Rita. My sister is doing a creative writing degree too. Her friend is running a writing competition to raise money for charity. POE kindly let me do a thread about it but I think it was on before you joined. I have put on the link in case you are interested. http://www.picturesofengland.com/forum/Off-Topic_Chat/2944
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| Rita Iton Posts: 325 Joined: 28th Jun 2009 Location: USA | quotePosted at 21:25 on 5th July 2009 On 5th July 2009 19:20, Ron Brind wrote:
Thanks Ron. |
| Rita Iton Posts: 325 Joined: 28th Jun 2009 Location: USA | quotePosted at 21:27 on 5th July 2009 On 5th July 2009 20:31, Stephanie Jackson wrote:
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