A blog from my editor....

Three Score Years and Ten

Little Indian Sioux or Crow

Little frosty Eskimo

Little Turk or Japonee,

Don’t you wish that you were me?

R.L. Stevenson

We were the generation that did not expect to grow up, our consciousness formed in the slough between the revelation of Hiroshima and the farcical maneuvering of the maniacal John Kennedy. We thought that Eliot was wrong about how the world ends, and we expected to hear the bang. We didn’t plan even for a thirtieth birthday, let alone a seventieth; yet here we are: as another poet, A.E. Housman must have said in his last decade

Of my three score years and ten,

Sev’nty will not come again.

I am not a great believer in what the gerontologists call life review: you should have gone ahead and done it at the time instead of regretting it afterwards; and if you didn’t, who’s to blame? It’s not that I have nothing to regret: perhaps most of all the time when the opportunity to train as a clinical psychologist presented itself and I was too lazy to pursue it. To those who may be surprised by this idea, I can only say that I believe that there are actually a lot of people in the world who are crazier than I am. And I am happy to report that there is no major thing which I did and which I wish I hadn’t: my mother is in charge of that department.

No, I dwell rather on the things which I did not get the chance to do, and on the things which I have done and now will do no more. I never had the chance to play Iago or Leontes (though I came close on the latter). I have seen the Grand Canyon twice, and have driven the wonderful, the magnificent Baja Peninsula in each direction (and do not wish to do it again even if I get the chance): both of these are things which I believe everyone should wish to experience at least once.

On the other hand, I am third-time-lucky in marriage, to a young woman (whom I love dearly two minutes out of every three) who keeps me on my toes – by means of strings attached to my hair – and insists on making me go to exotic places even if I have been there before. I have a son who has only ever listed two things I did wrong in raising him, and who once, in a rash moment in the middle of a lake, announced that he had been brung up right (which rash moment he has probably regretted, based on the number of times I have reminded him of it). Thanks to him, I have an adorable daughter-in-law and two beautiful granddaughters who may yet grow up to do amazing things, such as prove that string theory is correct (if they inherit my scientific bent, manifested in my well-documented scholastic record in chemistry and biology!), or dance at the Bolshoi, or play Lady MacBeth at the Royal Shakespeare. And thanks to my wife, I also have a complex and vivacious stepdaughter who will correct all the evils of society and who, as far as I can tell, not only appreciates my presence in her world, but may even wish I had entered it earlier, not least because of my stabilizing influence on her eccentric mother. All of that is a matter of luck, and might never have happened. Very few ever knew (and most of those who did are either dead or will have forgotten, and of those who remember, none will care) that I was a miracle baby, though I have not performed any miracles since. I could not have been born a year earlier and survived; and when I look at the larger picture of the world, I think I would not wish to have been born much later. I can only hope it works out for my children and my children’s children.

But what of that larger picture: what did we as a generation accomplish? And will we be missed? “Not much” is, I fear the answer to both questions. We were the product of a vertical culture, shaped by 55BC, 1066, and 1689, and I think that we, or others not much younger, were its end product. To use a hackneyed phrase, there seems to have been a paradigm shift, and it is now more important to be part of a horizontal culture, which I make no effort to do. I’m not even multicultural, refusing to believe that rap and hip-hop should be exalted to the status of Beethoven, Moliere, and Michelangelo. I still care more about who wrote the Shakespeare plays than about who won American Idol.

In short, I have begun the downward glide into curmudgeonhood (some would say I already have a master’s degree in the discipline), a self-confessed Luddite who does not text or twit and is not even on Facebook. I can’t even listen fast, as I have to remind my son every time we meet – but he’s smart, and he does get it. Most of the young people in one’s brief daily encounters don’t, so I tune them out: they’re probably not saying anything of major import anyway. I am now a follower of Santayana, who said that there is no cure for birth and death but to enjoy the interval. Having escaped death three times and quadriplegia twice, I will enjoy the interval, the remaining interval, and vicariously enjoy the trials and triumphs of my family and of those young friends who are still in the process of discovery. Then, dinosaur that I am, I will melt into extinction, like that little Indian sewer crow.