No society on earth comes close to matching America’s youthful imagination, its liberation of youthful energies, colors, forms, products, and narratives, all of which appeal directly to what is most neotenic or childlike in our nature. That America is comprehensible from the perspectives of all othe…
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Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
How old are you? The more thought you bring to bear on the question, the harder it is to answer. For we age simultaneously in different ways: biologically, psychologically, socially. And we age within the larger framework of a culture, in the midst
We have never before been so young, nor so old.
Lolita represents a different cultural type than her ancestors. She is not just an adolescent girl on her way to womanhood but a new specimen of humanity whose progeny will embody a historically unparalleled strain of youthfulness, even in their old age. In that sense we all share Lolita’s age.
Language does not arise from a need to escape but from a desire to enter, not from frowns of impotence but from a surplus of vitality and wonder.
O nature, o nature. Why do you not deliver on what you promised back then? Why do you deceive your children so?
A young boy and his grandfather in an old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest may cast their eyes on the same giant redwood, yet they do not see the same phenomenon. Because of their age difference, it appears one way to the boy, another to his elder. The sky I see today is more or less the same…
Only age gives time a measure of reality.
Nothing in the universe— be it the newborn infant or the universe itself— is without age.
The past does not cease to exist simply because we lose our memory of it.