Hello
Tonight, the creative, writingy part of me has beaten the rest in falling asleep. So you won't any original 'me' thoughts this evening. But I will give you a passage from a new book I boughted, called Lost Worlds. About stuff we don't have any more but used to - you know, stuff like Ancient Greek being a requirement at uni, people wearing hats, that kind of thing. My kind of book. This entry is called 'Adolescents, Envy Of':
"... a constant of our species has been its yearning envy of youth: the liminal land between childhood and the groaning yoke of adult life, when everything is possible. Everything, on the whole, meaning hope and passion.
Not any more.
The old envy was based on an ancient asymmetry: we gave you all this, and you repay the debt by being younger? By outliving us? By having opportunities which we have lost?
But the bargain has been broken, the debt called in. Look at the world we have left to the hapless adolescents of the early twenty-first century. A world of food fads and neuroses, of exploitation through mass media. The affectless uniformity of the Web. Danger lurking: perverts around every corner, terrorists in the shadows... A world where only a few will be able to afford a house. A world of McJobs or no jobs or insane jobs which eat the whole of life. Where illusions are buried, childhood drawn short, innocence drowned...
Poor adolescents. Bored by their music, stunned by their entertainment, living at home with parents who think of themselves as 'friends', they are deprived of adventure, self-invention and the greatest treasure of being envied; and, worst of all, they are understood."
Hee, I know that was upbeat.
'The only thing that prevented a father's love from faltering was the fact that there was in his possession a photograph of himself at the same early age, in which he, too, looked like a homicidal fried egg.' - Wodehouse
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