The Wit's Guide to Youth

Or, eat more hors d’oeuvres ASAP

First rule of Dutch art history: Age is inversely proportional to plumage.

As surely as youth is wasted on the young, complaints about the young are wasted on the old. They (we?) are the only ones who will listen, and to what end? The Wit’s Guide to Regret has already been written.

Better to praise the young for their wisdom. Rebecca Solnit said as much in a 2020 essay on feminism through the generations, whereinst¹ she cited the aphorism:

“Remember the respect due to youth.”

Her optimistic explanation is that while we may possibly gather individual wisdom as the sands slip through our respective hourglasses, we more dependably gain some collective wisdom over the generations. 

“One of the pernicious myths of our time is that wisdom accumulates with age in some steady, standard way, like tree rings,” she writes. “In this scheme, the old have it and the young lack it, and should open their little beaks and wait for a worm of wisdom to be dropped in.” So weird that no one wants to eat our dropped worms!

“The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.”
― Oscar Wilde

But the wise youth are their own cliche, as can be seen in the uncanny valley between Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. (Like any young person, I am of course referencing newspaper cartoon strips that stopped publishing a generation ago.) Charlie Brown and friends seem like small round adults when compared to Calvin, who is eerily reminiscent of a nine-year-old who currently resides in my home. The two cartoonists were best of frenemies, thanks to Watterson’s sniffing at all the Peanuts merchandising, which reminded me of Dave Eggers’s amazingly dated 2000 essay on selling out, and yes again I am old.

“Address yourself to young people; they know everything.”
― Joseph Joubert

Depictions of youth in art are generally ruined by the sepia tones. A wise or bemused or jaded old codger looks back and wistfully nods about If I’d Only Known. And yet somehow the movie Rushmore gets away with playing The Faces’ song Ooh La La over the credits, singing the quiet part out loud: “I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger.” And kids love it!

“How many cherries soaked in gin did I eat before I was ten?”
― Denton Welch

One surefire method to convincingly capture the emotional inner life of an adolescent: Become bedridden by a horrible car accident at the age of 20, then spend the next and last 13 years of your life writing Proustian autobiographical novels. Such was the case of Denton Welch, whose very enjoyable 1944 fever dream of a book In Youth Is Pleasure set a course for Holden Caulfield. The 15-year-old narrator spends an awful lot of time in sensory reveries, as one should at that age.

“Hors d’oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me: they remind me of one’s childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like — and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’oeuvres.”
― Saki

As Geoff Dyer (GWQ No. 89) pointed out this week, the late Martin Amis (GWQ No. 72) was called an enfant terrible into his 60s, well after infancy had segued to adultery. How do you get away with that?  

“To get back one’s youth one has merely to repeat one’s follies.”
― Oscar Wilde

It’s a nice inversion of Michael Kinsey’s famous line about Al Gore, “an old person’s idea of a young person,” which in today’s politics surely applies to Pete Buttigieg. So Amis was also an old person’s idea of youth — but maybe in the correct way?

“In youth, the absence of pleasure is pain. In old age, the absence of pain is pleasure.”
― Henry Addington

All of which is to say that when someone asks “Want to feel old?” just say no. Or at least wait a day, when you’ll be slightly less young.

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A false sense of urgency!

As most everyone knows, this newsletter costs nothing but four minutes of your time a week every week from now until the heat death of the universe — but if you do choose to become a paying subscriber, I use your money to commission terrific artists to sketch memorable quips on glossy postcards and then send you the results each month by unregistered mail.

Riposte Cards, they’re called, and new subscribers will receive THE COMPLETE SET of March, April and May’s editions in the mail if they (you!) sign up today. Hurry up! I’ve already bought the stamps! You’re not getting any younger!

Next week: The unmasking of June’s artist!

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Quote Vote

“The youth gets together materials for a bridge to the moon, and at length the middle-aged man decides to make a woodshed with them.”
― Henry David Thoreau

You’ll have to keep all those moon rocks somewhere, right? Where’s Dad? Out in the woodshed, counting asteroids. I think we’re ready for some science!

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Get Wit Quick No. 203 was just waking up from a nap when the news came through that Mart’d departed. Can I recommend the occasional podcast series The Martin Chronicles? It’s a slow read of his hits by recovering fans Dan Kois, Jason Zinoman and Parul Sehgal, who won my heart when she recalled buying The Rachel Papers at the Indigo in Place Montreal Trust. The odds that you’ll find my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting at said “cultural department store” are infinitesimally low as they mostly sell housewares now, but to be fair, it was a logical progression from the old saw that books do furnish a room. I’m not saying that the secret to eternal youth lies in tapping the ❤️ below, but I’m not not saying that.

1. Epenthesis of the week