The best years

LISTEN. Happy Halloween, happy November.

"Becoming adult" is our next chapter in Why Grow Up...

Stephen Law tweets: "I'm 60. Yet I don't feel that I am a 'grown up', and feel I would be a fraud if I pretended to be one (I do know how to *act* like a 'grown up')."

To which I say: just wait four years. 

A student asked the other day, in response to my approving citation of Susan Neiman's statement that it's a mistake to think the best years are between 16 and 26 (or 18 and 28?): What is the best? Sixty-four, I said. Next year I'll say sixty-five. When I stop updating my answer, you'll know my time is past. Not dead yet.

While I'm here, I'll still keep on trying to think for myself. That's Kant's definition of maturity. Are we there yet? 

Education, travel, and work at their best all "undercut the dogmatism of the worldviews into which we are born." That's the project of a lifetime. Not learning, not going, not finding something valuable to do with your time all block it. Sadly, many are blocked early and never get going. Many get stuck replicating the choices and limited opportunities demonstrated by their parents. But "if you don't reject any of their choices you are not grown-up." And if you won the parent-lottery, you'll find plenty of their choices to have been spot-on. Not all, though. 

Learn some languages and learn to love music early on, is something I wish the adults in my life had been more insistent about. They gave me a good model of fluent English, and bought me a piano and lessons. But I wanted to play ball during lesson-time. Coulda done both, with the right cajoling.  Or incentives. They used to give me dollars for A's, why not for sticking with Mrs. Boas?; and then her successor whose name now escapes me and who I resented, ironically I now see, because lesson time coincided with the first half of my favorite TV show: Glen Campbell. John Hartford was great on that. 

But my parents, who had not read Rousseau's Emile, nonetheless reflected its conviction that children must be raised in freedom and happiness. They weren't Tiger parents, they wanted me to want to pound those keys. They wanted me to accept responsibility for my own choices. And later, they supported my academic choices as a young adult. Not every philosophy major can say that. I was fortunate in my choice of parents.

Neiman has interesting things to say about books, which "make you think differently about love and loss and integrity," and the book of the world, which as Augustine said is sadly neglected by so many who know only one page.  Travelers are readers of the great world-book. Stay-at-homes mistake their own cultural assumptions for the whole of reality. They do not dwell in possibility, their actuality is stunted. 

But virtual travel is one good thing about the internet. Interesting story on Sunday Morning about a photographer of old abandoned homes who finds them with Google maps. But then he goes there. 

Best way to travel is still on shanks' mare. Those who do not walk, said Rousseau, are like "prisoners in a small closed-up cage." If you want to understand where you are, you've got to get away. In your mind, anyway. Isn't that what the poet meant when he talked about not ceasing from exploration? 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time...