Quote of the Day (George Eliot, on Youth, ‘The Season of Hope’)

“[Y]outh is the season of hope... only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt... to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final,... because it is new.” — English novelist Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot (1819-1880), Middlemarch (1871) 

Quote of the Day (Joseph Conrad, on Youth, ‘The Feeling That Will Never Come Back Anymore’)

“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back anymore—the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.”— Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), “Youth: A Narrative,” originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine (1898), republished in Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (1902)

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on ‘Everybody’s Youth’)

“ ‘Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.’

‘How pleasant then to be insane!’"—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” in Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Quote of the Day (Rob Lowe, on the Malibu Kids of His Youth)

“Malibu kids are isolated, solitary by nature, and when among their peers they form small, extremely tight cliques. The surfers. The burn-outs. The brains. The nerds. There are also those who seem like ghosts, not belonging to anyone or any clique. The Lost Boys of Malibu. And indeed, their tragic narrative of freak accidents and death will play itself out throughout my teen years.” —Actor Rob Lowe, Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography (2011)

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on Retrieving One’s Youth)

“To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies."—Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Quote of the Day (Joe Jackson, on Cynicism as a ‘Disease of the Young’)

“Some of my early stuff was infected by the deadly disease of cynicism, which is a disease of the young, I think. When you’re young, it seems very clever to be cynical. But as you get older, hopefully, if you’re not completely stupid, you realize that you have to be a bit more positive, as a simple matter of survival. You know what I mean?”—English singer-songwriter Joe Jackson quoted in Sarah Larson, “Joe Jackson, Past, Present, and Fast Forward,” The New Yorker, Oct. 15, 2015

Yesterday marked the 67^th birthday of Joe Jackson, a musician who has grandly resisted genre pigeonholing. Sarah Larson’s combined concert review-interview from a few years ago captures his “sideways, sly” lyrics, as well as his impatience with the late Seventies stereotyping of him as an angry young man in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. (“I was really poking fun. A lot of people were doing that back then.”)

I myself have been partial to the two LPs he created in the early Eighties after coming to New York, Night and Day and Body and Soul, which incorporated pop, jazz and salsa textures.

It was a long way from his upbringing in Portsmouth, England, a dingy place that fueled his desire to escape. Admission to the Royal Academy of Music set him on a lifelong path, described memorably in his 1999 quasi-memoir, A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage:

"I saw music as White Magic. Pure energy, pure emotion, pure spirit. I thought that musicians, regardless of what kind of music they played, were beyond reproach, like firefighters or nuns.”

I have never had the opportunity to hear Jackson in concert, but YouTube clips suggest an idiosyncratic, interesting performer not content with note-for-note playing of oldies, as does this quote from a February 2019 interview with Jim McGuinn on the Minnesota Public Radio musical website/station “The Current”:

“Obviously it's me that's changed rather than the songs. But in some cases the songs embarrass me and I don't play them anymore. In other cases I still like them and do play them. A lot of times I've tried to do new arrangements of them — change them around and keep them interesting. And every now and again, some of the songs on this tour, we've gone right back to playing them exactly as they were recorded, which kind of goes against the grain a bit for me, to be honest. But sometimes it's fun to do that as well.

Quote of the Day (Joseph Conrad, on Youth Vs. Wealth As Assets)

“The audacity of youth reckons upon what it fancies an unlimited time at its disposal; but a millionaire has unlimited means in his hand—which is better. One's time on earth is an uncertain quantity, but about the long reach of millions there is no doubt.” — Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904)

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on April’s ‘Spirit of Youth in Everything’)

“From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.”—English playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), “Sonnet 98” (“From You Have I Been Absent in The Spring”), in Sonnets (1609)

Quote of the Day (Edward Hirsch, on a ‘Boy With a Headset’)

“He is a fifteen-year-old in the city—no more, no less—
but I imagine him as a colorful unnamed bird
warbling his difference from the robins and sparrows
and scissoring past the vendors on every corner.”—American poet Edward Hirsch, “Boy With a Headset,” The New Yorker, Oct. 8, 2004

(Photo of Edward Hirsch taken by Michael Lionstar.)

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on a Dangerous Youthful Passion)

"There was some kind of passion between them. It gave off a faint wrong smoky odor, like something burning where it shouldn't be, arson committed by children playing with matches." ― American mystery novelist Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), The Instant Enemy (1968)

Quote of the Day (Author Jacqueline Woodson, on Experiencing Music as a Youth and Adult)

“When you're young, music is evocative of a future and a promise, and when you're an adult, it's evocative of the past."—Young adult novelist Jacqueline Woodson, quoted in “Soapbox: The Columnists—This Month: WSJ Asks Six Luminaries to Weigh in on a Single Topic; This Month: Music,” WSJ.com, September 2019 issue

(Photo of Jacqueline Woodson taken at the 2018 U.S. National Book Festival, Sept. 1, 2018, by Fuzheado.)

Quote of the Day (Dawn Powell, on Friendship in Youth and Age)

“Friendship in youth represents sympathy without understanding; in age, understanding without sympathy.”— Novelist Dawn Powell, The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965, edited by Tim Page (1998)

Quote of the Day (Joseph Conrad, on Youth)

“Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour — of youth!... A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and — goodbye! — Night — Goodbye!” — Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative (1902)

Quote of the Day (Nixon, Agnew, and Govs Trip Out)

“WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 -- President Nixon, Vice President Agnew and 40 of the nation's Governors sampled movies of simulated psychedelic "trips" and anti-Establishment rock tunes today in a morning-long educational presentation on drugs and American youth.”—Peter Grose, “Governors See Simulated ‘Trip’ at Nixon Presentation on Drugs,” The New York Times, December 4, 1969

Okay, so maybe I stretched a little bit with that headline. If it makes you feel better, let’s say the lot of them virtually tripped out, okay? Nevertheless, I remain convinced that this fact-finding “trip” was the most oddball attempt that the upper levels of the American government made in the late Sixties and early Seventies to discover the root causes of the “Generation Gap.” Now, a number of my readers might argue with this point, given that there’s so much competition for this dubious award. Below are other events in this DC Believe It or Not—and you, faithful reader, are invited to submit your own to the CEO of this blog:

* The Supreme Court, in its attempt to define obscenity, watches several sexually explicit movies, with salty Justice Thurgood Marshall providing blow-by-blow accounts to the visually impaired associate justice John Marshall Harlan II.

* Richard Nixon visits the Lincoln Memorial in the wee hours of the morning in 1970 to talk to Vietnam protestors.

* Nixon (him again?) appoints Elvis Presley his personal top-secret drug enforcement agent.

But I can only conclude, despite the evidently real care that Nixon took with this issue, that the problem wasn’t with America’s youth (or, as Joe Pesci put it in “My Cousin Vinny,” “these yutes”), but with the Silent Majority. It was they, not the young of America, who helped elect Nixon—not once, but twice.

These two acts are so embarrassing that anyone who came to adulthood in that era would, I think, prefer to have young people today believe that their choice stemmed from drug use rather than a sane use of their faculties.

Nixon, to be sure, had problems relating to the youth culture. You could see that in his speech at the dinner that night with the governors, when he admitted that he thought the entertainment was going to be provided by The Temptations (who would have been able to tell the politicos a thing or two about drug use) when it turned out to be The Fifth Dimension. (This admission functioned as almost a double example of his cluelessness: not only about youth culture, but about blacks.)

At the same dinner, Nixon disputed the notion that youth turned to drugs because life was too hard. “I think the problem with American youth is that life is so easy,” he went on. “Perhaps what American youth need is a challenge.”

You see here, in pedestrian language, to be sure, something Nixon was bound to do on occasion: steal themes from the heroes of that same youth culture, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. At least a couple of his speeches tried to appropriate, for his own use, the famous rhetorical tropes used by these men (“Ask not…” and “I have a dream…”).

Here, he’s looking to JFK’s core idea behind the Peace Corps. This was the New Nixon that everyone was talking about before the election—the same one, earlier in the day, who had talked with the governors about the importance of educating youth about drugs rather than criminalizing their use.

Then the Old Nixon popped out, Hyde-like—briefly, to be sure, but, in retrospect, something that should have given his listeners pause. Today’s youth, he noted, didn’t have to struggle for “the necessities that some of us may have had to work to achieve in order to meet the challenges of life.”

This was the man forever blighted by his poverty-stricken childhood in Yorba Linda, Calif.—someone who had watched his brother Harold die of TB because his father had insisted that the family drink raw milk. He had managed to surmount the worst that the world could throw at him—why couldn’t everyone else, like those voters who inexplicably loved the Kennedys and the eastern elites that supported them?