Re: hmm....birthdays...
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 09 Feb 1999 22:53:57 +1100
I appreciate your view of the practical difficulties of school - but I
would not restrict the search for one's identity merely to school. In fact,
I could possibly - no, definitely - say I had far more of a sense of myself
and my identity in school than I do now, because in such a conformist
environment you are constantly forced to define yourself in relation (or
retaliation) to them. I have found the process of aging to be one of
dissipation rather than consolidation; I find myself not knowing what I
like or what I *am* like simply because I am holding everything up against
a canvas which is so much larger. I have not found my tastes crystalising
but find them more multifarious and confusing than ever. I knew the bands I
liked when I was sixteen. Now I hate some, am indifferent to others and
think the rest is crap. Which of me was right, the sixteen year old or the
21 year old?
Wordsworth was (I think) the one who said that genius is childhood
rediscovered at will; while I don't wholly subscribe to this early
Victorian form of child-worship I have barely found anything to refute it
so far. Maybe this is an early-20s type of thing. Sometimes I wonder if and
when I become a parent (hopefully many years from now) it will all change,
but I fear, as I have found with so many things, that the anticipation
doesn't match the fulfilment.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest
Jude wrote:
> Allow me to propose an alternate view, Camille, on two counts. First,
> which high school life are you talking about? the one where your parents
> buy you nice clothes, and you can spend your money on a CD, and all you
> have to do is homework or talk on the phone? Or the one where you don't
> know where your breakfast is coming from, you have to step over nodded
out
> druggies to even get to school, and you spend a a great deal of your day
> warding off fellow students who want to fuck you in the stair well?
> But all that stuff aside, if high school is easy for some in practical
> ways, and wonderful in its passions and newness of blossoming awareness,
it
> is devastatingly hard in others. Never is one less sure of their identity
> and where they fit in. Never, at any other time in one's life, can one
be
> so deeply cut by another's word, or disregard. Never, is one so
vulnerable.
> On behalf of aging people, let me say that with age comes strength and
> power, an ability to create your own identity, comfort with your own very
> individual sense of what is right, good, fun, exciting. Age seems to
bring
> with it the time and inclination to look at things more deeply, to skim
> less over the surface, and most certainly, to appreciate each moment.
Every
> time my teenage son actually talks to me, every time I finish a book and
> close it and sigh with pleasure, every time I take a beautiful pen to a
> thick piece of paper, I feel a gratefulness that only comes with age.
> These may be different passions, but passions nonetheless, and they are
> mine, not those of any pack.