Confessions of a Four-year Old

Yesterday’s musings on neighbours inadvertently threw up an old flame from my puerile fantasy world. Combine that with a bang on the head and suddenly I’m remembering the other influential women from my days of emerging consciousness. A four-year old surely does not have much to go on when it comes to the rational discrimination of beauty, so I offer you these four angels as pure forms, who appealed to me in an unmitigated manner, haunting my early childhood dreams. My wife says it is pretty clear what my ‘type’ was, but I had thought from a relatively young age that I could pretty much find a redeeming beauty in any face. I wonder now if those redeeming features in some way evoke the memory of a small part of these four faces. Looking at them now, together, for the first time in years, I realise that the primal attraction is undimmed. Looking at them in their current form, wearing the years most respectably, I think my four-year old self knew what he was doing. Anyway, with apologies for this bizarre turn (surely a result of a rattled brain), may I present Felicity, Agnetha, Deborah, and Olivia. Please bear in mind that I want to hear nothing whatsoever about Freud. If that’s your cup of tea, fine, but drink it somewhere else.

Then:

And now:

Being A Grown-Up

Are you an adult? I’m not asking for a declaration of age, but of intent. Not a license to drink, buy lottery tickets, smoke, drive, or vote, but the sense of responsibility that ought to come with the lattermost of that list. I’m given to ask because of an article in the Wall Street Journal, essentially plugging a book called Manning Up: How the Rise of Women has turned Men into Boys by Kay S. Hymowitz. Apparently, there’s a new phase in the life cycle called ‘pre-adult’, which falls after adolescence and before adulthood proper, and is a synonym for ‘idiot’. This extension of the puerile state is one that we have probably all encountered, but it might be worth looking in the mirror, just to make sure you’re not a jerk.

The basic diagnosis is that a large number of young men (a typical example will hold a university degree and a sense of entitlement) who have had opportunities unique to their generation, have turned en masse into Bertie Wooster. Alas, they have no Jeeves, and thus, no restraint. Blessed with a disposable income, and with access to all the trappings of childhood that have been re-designed for the affluent twenty-something, they blunder through life without checks and balances, without responsibilities or a sense of ever wanting them, drinking and playing video games, and generally behaving as if life is one long frat party. They are really a deplorable lot.

I have personal experience with this new ‘difficult age’, for it is without doubt difficult to define adulthood for the up-and-coming graduate. But difficulty does not excuse a lack of effort. As some of my good friends will testify, I positively sought adulthood for many years. The forces outside ourselves will keep us locked in unsavoury patterns unless we move to assert ourselves. This move begins with the question, ‘what is my purpose?’ and finds its answers in responsibilities and duties of various kinds: personal, familial, and civic.

One must first ask how one is to be seen in the world, and to strive to be the best one can be. There is an element of the Golden Rule here, which I see as essentially reflexive. When we exhort ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, we must first understand how we should wish to be done unto. If we set poor examples, and meander fecklessly through life, we can hardly be surprised if others treat us with aloof disregard. In order to serve others, we must first serve ourselves.

As the self is re-defined according to a model of goodness, the sense of relations to those dear to us take on a different aspect. The nature of friendship and family is slowly revealed for its true value. The importance of filial relations supersedes loose notions of fraternity, that essentially revolve around sexual conquest, alcohol and, these days, facebook gossip.

A sense of place is arrived at, and its context – the nation – comes into view. Define your nation as you will – the term has assumed a fluidity in recent times – but we shall not avoid a sense of civic responsibility that comes with a recognition of the value of that which we hold dear as adults. Understanding how we should be like to be done unto, and how we should like our friends and families to be done unto, requires a degree of striving and vigilance as a citizen lest the power structures of our reality threaten, or fall short of, our ideals of how life should be. The most appalling and dangerous symptom of the ‘pre-adult’ is his political apathy. As he happily rolls through life, he has no notion of the responsibility that comes with the freedom he enjoys. Be afraid of any young man who asserts that politics makes no difference to him.

Being a grown-up seems no longer to come naturally with age. If that is so, we had better start to think about what it takes.

What Is Old?

Now I am rampant with memory. I don’t often indulge in this, or not so very often, anyway. Some people will tell you that the old live in the past – that’s nonsense. Each day, so worthless really, has a rarity for me lately. I could put it in a vase and admire it, like the first dandelions, and we would forget their weediness and marvel that they were there at all (Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel, 1964).

My ‘Old Man’ had a birthday this week. I won’t divulge his age, although I’m sure he is still yet young. He occasionally protests that he is an old man, but I won’t hear of it. Age, in this age, is a state of mind, and will only become more so. We have it within our grasp, each of us, to live to a biblical age. Once a man reaches sixty he has a very high statistical chance of reaching eighty, and many, of course, will go way beyond that. By the time I am sixty I will fully expect to reach my century, and I have secret (well, not any more) designs on attaining the ripe number of 120. How dreadfully tiresome, dull and pathetic it would be, therefore, if we declared ourselves old at sixty, as did men of not-so-long ago. That might very well only be half way! Think of the possibilities!

We shall have to re-evaluate what it means to do a life’s work over such a long innings. When the Old Age Pension was introduced in Britain in the good old Edwardian era, the clever politicians put on it a qualifying age of seventy. At that time, the age of seventy, the mythical three-score years and ten, was significantly higher than the average life expectancy. It was, from a governmental point of view, a pretty safe bet. Over the years that age threshold came down, even as life expectancy went up. Generations grew up on the promise of increased leisure, and interpreted is as a license to be idle in one’s dotage, which was projected to last for a good long stint, while the government paid a pile to keep everyone going. It was a sweet thought, but utterly unsustainable. Now the British and the French have undergone revisions to the pensionable age (the British with rather more stoic fatalism than the French), and those revisions are set to continue. When I went to school the retirement age was set at sixty-five for men, sixty for women. What will it be when I actually reach sixty-five? Seventy? Seventy-five? Eighty? Chances are there will be no such thing as a State pension by then, but it’s worth stopping for a minute to consider our futures in a way that we perhaps do not typically. We may be around for longer than we think.

All the more important then to carefully think about what work is to us. Vocations these days are rare. Jobs for life? Seems unlikely. In the West, few people learn a trade, a skill, a craft anymore. Yet now more than ever we have the time. In the days when fifty might have been considered an unlikely milestone, apprenticeships lasted perhaps seven years. In our breakneck desire to make as much money as possible for the least possible effort, we eschew such patience and diligence. I’ve said before that it seems to me that most people hate what they do. Well, do something else. There’ll be time to see it through. We have the opportunity to give vent to the courage of our convictions. Seek fulfillment. Lord knows we may have a long time to endure life’s resentment if we do not.