Roundtable

Wasted on the Young

An introduction to our Spring issue, “Youth.”

By Elias Altman

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

 “Adolescent Girl, a Spinner, in a Carolina Cotton Mill,” 1908. Photograph by Lewis Hine. Princeton University Art Museum. 

“One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy,” George Eliot lamented in a letter to a friend in 1844. “I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Edward Young’s theory that ‘as soon as we have found the key of life, it opens the gates of death.’” It was spring again in northern Coventry, and the future author of Middlemarch was twenty-four years old. A morbid thought for one so young, but what is youth if not a world of melodrama, strutting and fretting? For the young, all experience is new experience, the action unfolding as a parade of excitement, desire, betrayal, anger, ambition, joy—often all in the same afternoon. Youth affords a clarity of impression, the exactitude of unmitigated feeling, and we later come to recollect with poignancy a carefree summer day spent climbing trees or that kiss behind the swing set as what our youth was all about. Is it lost before we know it, those golden days wasted and spent? Or is it a thing seen only from afar, a convenient classification to cleave what I was from who I am?

If the magic of early life seems only to grow the further it recedes, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any magic to begin with; the alluring green light at the end of Daisy’s distant dock was green up close too. Henry Adams, a descendant of the second and sixth U.S. presidents, wrote in his autobiography, published posthumously in 1918, “Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant.” Adams was a boy of six in 1845, the year those observations characterize: around the time Eliot was worrying over the science of happiness, Adams was living it. “Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was tropical license.” Such dualities are endemic to childhood, for boys as well as girls, whether in New England or old. Life is extreme; imagination will make it so if circumstance does not.

Robert Louis Stevenson, writer of those pre-Hardy Boys classics Treasure Island and Kidnapped, held that “in the child’s world of dim sensation, play is all in all. ‘Making believe’ is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character.” That pile of pillows is Pharaoh’s pyramid, the carpeted floor nothing but hot lava, and I am the teacher of this schoolhouse:Dolls, please quiet down. The world is animated by the sense that everything in it is more than it is. Even something like porridge is vast, containing multitudes, and with bowls of it in front of him and his cousin, Stevenson was fond of “exchanging bulletins.”

How here was an island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and traveled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how, in the end, the food was of altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams.

But dreams wouldn’t be dreams if they weren’t also dashed or deferred. Albert Schweitzer was in an Alsatian grade school around 1883 when he was first rudely awakened. He didn’t pay it much mind when his best friend threatened to tell away a secret of his; that breach of trust wasn’t possible. Until it was. “This first experience of betrayal smashed to pieces everything that I had thought and expected of life,” recalled Schweitzer, by then a retired mission doctor who had served in Africa. “It took me weeks to get over the shock. I had lost my innocence about life. I bore within me the painful wound which life inflicts on us all and which it reopens again and again with new blows. Some of the blows I have received since then were harder than that first one, but none has hurt more.” The first cut is the deepest.

Children are capable of cruelty, in part because the moment is their master. Jean de La Bruyère, author of The Characters, or the Manners of the Age, observed in 1688 that “children are neither for the past nor the future, but enjoy the present, which we rarely do.” It’s a good distinction, a difference between them, the young, and us, the old, but he saw a likeness too: “Children are overbearing, supercilious, passionate, envious, inquisitive, egotistical, idle, fickle, timid, intemperate, liars, and dissemblers; they laugh and weep easily, are excessive in their joys and sorrows, and that about the most trifling objects—they bear no pain but like to inflict it on others; already they are men.” Make no mistake, these little people are just that, since the child is father to the man. Jonathan Edwards, the Congregationalist preacher of the Great Awakening, wasn’t fooled by dimpled cheeks or chubby arms. “As innocent as children seem to be to us, yet, if they are out of Christ, they are not so in God’s sight but are young vipers—and are infinitely more hateful than vipers—and are in a most miserable condition, as well as grown persons.”

That’s why we have education, religious or secular, to mold character, train the mind, cleanse the soul. The end isn’t debated as much as the means. Writing two years after he summited San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders, Theodore Roosevelt was preaching the doctrine of American vitality: “The boy can best become a good man by being a good boy—not a goody-goody boy, but just a plain good boy.” There are those flashes of autobiography in impersonal writings, a well-turned or clunky phrase made so by too much reflection, and here one senses the zealotry of a reformed goody two-shoes: Teddy, that wheezing, frail, and nearsighted boy, making amends for some past tattling or an even deeper betrayal. Roosevelt may have wished that he’d been given the Spartan treatment while growing up. “As for learning, they had just what was absolutely necessary,” Plutarch wrote of the young inhabitants of the austere polis that once conquered Athens. “All the rest of their education was calculated to make them subject to command, to endure labor, to fight and conquer.” That’s a recipe for the strenuous life.

But one needn’t have survived a Spartan childhood to take a dim view of being a child. In her letter, George Eliot went on to say,

I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual, if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one! Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.

An aspiring painter by the name of Maria Bashkirtseva asked her diary in 1876, “Is my poor youth to be spent between the dining room and petty domestic worries?” A young woman’s proper conduct was too much—or rather not enough. “What do I want?” the twenty-year-old Bashkirtseva asked. “Oh, you know well enough. I want glory.” Sure enough, Bashkirtseva showed her paintings a few years later at the 1880 Paris Salon, and by 1884, at the age of twenty-five, she was dead of tuberculosis. Instead of her paintings, it was her diary—a posthumously published bestseller—that brought her glory.

Back in 1876, though, she was knee-deep in adolescent angst—the awkward phase when ambitions are least commensurate with talent. American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, the first person in the U.S. to receive a PhD in psychology, observed in 1905, “Modern life is hard, and in many respects increasingly so, on youth. Home, school, church, fail to recognize its nature and needs and, perhaps most of all, its perils.” The failure of the wider world to recognize the natures and needs of a young man or woman is indeed the defining feature of most people’s experience of adolescence—the not being understood by anyone, parents especially, but peers too. As the novelist Doris Lessing pointed out, though, “growing up is after all only the understanding that one’s incredible experience is what everyone shares.” And of course there’s glory in that incredible experience—when certain mistakes are still new, the possible seems likely, and we are bold without knowing it. That is the wonder of youth, and as Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry says in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot…Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was twenty-three when This Side of Paradise made him famous in 1920, wrote that at his moment of ascension—newly wed to Zelda and newly anointed the voice of his generation—he remembered “riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.” That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a fine articulation of the great line that youth whispers in our ears again and again: There’s nothing better than me. This was a statement that George Eliot could not bring herself to hear. All her reasoning was to say that we must be “happier than when we were seven years old, and that we shall be happier when we are forty than we are now, which I call a comfortable doctrine, and one worth trying to believe!” It’s a wager we must make, since it’s that doctrine that takes the sting out of paying the monthly mortgage, of waking up for work at 7 A.M. five days a week, of sorting out your kid’s Verizon bill on your lunch break during a call that may be monitored for quality assurance. It’s true, isn’t it, we are happier now, wielding all the responsibility we once craved, making the decisions we once made-believe? We are adults; that’s the way it is, and it’s a good thing too. At least, isn’t it pretty to think so?