Lapham’s Quarterly 7-03: Youth (2014). “Youth’s a stuff will not endure” sang Feste the Fool in Twelfth Night. But the response to that insight is mixed. Some mourn what they recall as a time of promise and energy and sweet, sweet love of the world and the people in it. Others are glad it’s over, and they can, at last, embark on a life planned and controlled by themselves. The evidence gathered here suggests that the latter attitude is the more common one.
Me, what I recall from my childhood and youth surprises me in two ways. One, I can’t actually imagine the Me that was six or twelve years old. The photos of me, the letters that my mother kept, the oddments that I know were once precious to me, none of them translate into Oh, now I know what it was like. And two, when I think of the dumb-ass things I did as a teenager, I’m surprised I’m still here to remember them. A fraction of a second one way or the other would have meant my death.
Nevertheless, reading other people’s thoughts and reminiscences does trigger a hint of a feeling of what childhood and youth was like. The imagination supplies what memory cannot.
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