The Perpetual Adolescent (Another City)
“At a certain point in American life, the young ceased to be viewed as a transient class and youth as a phase of life through which everyone soon passed. Instead, youthfulness was vaunted and carried a special moral status. Adolescence triumphed, becoming a permanent condition.”
So writes Joseph Epstein in a witty and now-classic article that is even timelier than in 2004, when it was first published. In our tastes and values, in our political opinions and our moral judgments, in our cynical or ironic or frivolous approach to serious matters, we cling desperately to a fading semblance of youth and a fondness for its follies.
But we live in a time that calls for mature and balanced judgment, for the wisdom that the ancients knew comes only from those situations in which we take life seriously and put ourselves on the line, drawing as best we can upon the counsel of our own elders and the inimitable Wisdom of a Fatherly God.
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Meanwhile, our own children search in vain for adults, for actual grown-ups who will lead them and give them a direction in life, seeking instead in popular messiahs and social media chatter what their parent-pals, still pursuing their adolescence, have withheld from them—only to learn too late the advice of Ecclesiastes (7:5) that it would have been “better to heed the rebuke of a wise person than to listen to the song of fools.”
Whenever anyone under the age of 50 sees old newsreel film of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak of 1941, he is almost certain to be brought up by the fact that nearly everyone in the male-dominated crowds—in New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland—seems to be wearing a suit and a fedora or other serious adult hat. The people in those earlier baseball crowds, though watching a boyish game, nonetheless had a radically different conception of themselves than most Americans do now. A major depression was ending, a world war was on. Even though they were watching an entertainment that took most of them back to their boyhoods, they thought of themselves as adults, no longer kids, but grown-ups, adults, men.
How different from today, when a good part of the crowd at any ballgame, no matter what the age, is wearing jeans and team caps and T-shirts; and let us not neglect those (one hopes) benign maniacs who paint their faces in home-team colors or spell out, on their bare chests, the letters of the names of star players: S-O-S-A.
