micrographia

Name:
Location: Iowa, United States

61 years old (pretty old for a blogger) proud to be a grandpa

Friday, January 30, 2009

I agree with this

Editorial by Kruathhamer well worth reading.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Perpetual Adolescence

Here are the last two paragraphs of an essay by Joseph Epstein that struck a chord with me. If you want to see the entire essay, go here.



"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. As one grew older, one was presented with two choices, to seem an old fogey for attempting to live according to one's own standard of adulthood, or to go with the flow and adapt some variant of pulling one's long gray hair back into a ponytail, struggling into the spandex shorts, working on those abs, and ending one's days among the Rip Van With-Its. Not, I think, a handsome set of alternatives.

"The greatest sins, Santayana thought, are those that set out to strangle human nature. This is of course what is being done in cultivating perpetual adolescence, while putting off maturity for as long as possible. Maturity provides a more articulated sense of the ebb and flow, the ups and downs, of life, a more subtly reticulated graph of human possibility. Above all, it values a clear and fit conception of reality. Maturity is ever cognizant that the clock is running, life is finite, and among the greatest mistakes is to believe otherwise. Maturity doesn't exclude playfulness or high humor. Far from it. The mature understand that the bitterest joke of all is that the quickest way to grow old lies in the hopeless attempt to stay forever young.

Friday, January 09, 2009

Huh?

Everything else aside, what's the deal with "The Office of the President-Elect"?