Generations

For the left, the world has always been, and always will be, a scandal. In this American election year, it has not escaped their anger and disgust that of the two presumed candidates for a second residential lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the incumbent is eighty-one years of age, while his challenger is seventy-eight. Yet that societies should be governed by their elders was taken for granted through all of human history down to very recent times. This was owing not to their experience alone, but to the fact that premodern people lived substantially in the past, recognizing that it — as Faulkner said — “is never dead, it’s not even past.

Recently, a famous American novelist came to stay at my place in London. In her later Substack post she described me as “an older gentleman.” It’s an accurate description — I’m sixty-eight! — but why does it make me feel so uneasy? Older is fine. And so too is gentleman. But put them together and the phrase “older gentleman” brings to mind — at least my mind — a Prufrock-like figure. A rotund old guy who wears a bright cravat and a brave smile and potters through his pointless days, softly whistling half-remembered showtunes from the Golden Age of Broadway. A life punctuated with sighs and resuscitated with cups of tea. Reader, I’m not that man — yet. No, I don’t have a problem with growing older; I have a problem with growing up.