The Wit’s Guide to Golden Ages

Or, when nobody knows anything

Joachim Wtewael’s The Golden Age depicts Ovid’s conception of a time when sweet nectar flowed, loincloths and fig leaves were strategically placed, the bulldogs all had rubber teeth and the hens laid soft-boiled eggs.

We are almost certainly in the middle of a golden age — but of what? There is compelling evidence that this is a wonderful time for home coffee grinding, ignorance, streaming whodunits, cataract surgery, smut, Costco and rum. If it’s all of the above, we may be living in the golden age of golden ages.

“The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”
— Randall Jarrell

But even the abundance of smutty rum that defines our era pales in comparison to the original golden age, as identified by the Greek poet Hesiod. That was before we discovered fire, back when the Earth produced more food than we knew what to do with, no one suffered any sort of hardship or pain, and when death eventually arrived, it did so gently while you were sleeping. As a level-setting exercise, it’s worth pointing out that this never actually happened.

“Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.”
— Michael Chabon

Also, what did any of that have to do with gold? The incorruptible and rust-free metal was a metaphor for godliness, but nothing was actually made of the substance in this prelapsarian idyll. On the contrary, the poets remind us, the more actual gold changes hands, the less golden the age:

“Truly now is the golden age; the highest honour comes by means of gold; by gold love is procured.”
— Ovid, displaying the sort of sass that got him exiled

“The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.”
— G.K. Chesterton

And our modern understanding of golden ages as periods of fantastic innovation and artistry has a clear link to filthy lucre, or rather a sudden lack of it. The writer Ian Leslie suggests golden ages occur when capitalism and creativity are in rare alignment: An old system of making money has crumbled and interesting new forms of expression suddenly become wise investments. Between art in the Belle Époque and television’s recent golden age, it all ends once shareholders find safer bets. “Only when nobody knows anything does a creative industry bet on its creators,” Leslie writes. “Golden ages come to an end when everybody knows something.”

“Many a crown of wisdom is but the golden chamberpot of success, worn with pompous dignity.”
— Paul Eldridge

Naturally, your opinion of the age we’re in has much to do with the age you are. As Douglas Adams put it in The Salmon of Doubt, any technology that exists when you’re born is normal and ordinary; any technology invented when you are between the ages of 15 and 35 is “new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it”; and anything after that is against the natural order of things.

“The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve.”
— Peter Graham

As such, my conception of a golden age was the 1990s, after the Berlin Wall had fallen but before the first tech boom. But was it that great? The foundational text of that time, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, suggested the term “legislated nostalgia” for when you “force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess.” But I distinctly recall reading that book under a fruit-laden tree and clear blue skies, not knowing anything about anything, serenely unbothered, having zero notifications on any sort of device, and loving it.

“The past, the Golden Age of the past — what a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don’t want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.”
— D.H. Lawrence

The bad thing about the present day is that any number of bad things might happen; the good thing about the past is that a finite number of bad things did happen and we know what they were. The best thing about the future is that it’s not here yet, but when it arrives next week the subject will be one of the following:

Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, I serendipitously (re)discovered Carol Brown, a song by Flight of the Conchords that’s a parodic homage (or homagic parody) of Paul Simon’s 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. Whereas the original only lists five distinct ways to get out of town, the parmage clocks in at 19 and features a bonus subplot about cereal.

Get Wit Quick No. 379 was written under partially golden skies, which aren’t as pleasant as they sound. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck, because I’m a big music guy. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Tap the ❤️ below to hasten the arrival of, if not the golden age, then at least an age of more heart taps.