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Mar. 2nd, 2005 01:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionHaving exactly 13 months of my own remaining, I'm obsessing over one's 20s and what they mean, what might be lost with them.
People say they wish they were 18 again but the key word there is again. That was a high point of potential for many of us but mostly potential wasted through lack of knowledge. It's the 20s where you get it together, where every direction is up.
In literature 20-odds gave us A Tale of a Tub, Werther, The Pickwick Papers, Wuthering Heights, most of Sketches from a Hunter's Album, the Childhood trilogy, Sons and Lovers, Dubliners, Murphy, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Sound and the Fury, The Great Gatsby, The Crying of Lot 49, Welty's '30s stories; Aristophanes' best comedies, Marlowe's plays, Andromache, The Robbers, the Urfaust, Danton's Death, Love's Labor's Lost, possibly Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Putting aside Marlowe, Sidney, Keats, Shelley etc. there's Book I (and possibly Book II) of the Faerie Queene, Comus and most of Milton's best lyric work, Marvell's garden and love poems, the most poetic Pope poems (Rape of the Lock, Windsor Forest, Essay on Criticism, Eloisa to Abelard, An Unfortunate Lady), Blake's Poetical Sketches and maybe his Innocence songs, Wordsworth's most sublime and least irritating work, Coleridge's three or four masterpieces including The Rime, Byron's Romantic work, Beddoes' exquisite Bride's Tragedy, Tennyson's most powerful lyrics, Atalanta in Calydon etc. etc. And that's just among the British.
Many of these listed won't be considered their authors' greatest, yet all have appeal (to me, anyway) somehow outshining works even more profound and masterful produced in later life. Even with authors like Chekhov, Kafka, and Browning, where the earlier work is dramatically surpassed by the later, there's a not-quite definable something, a something optimistic even through pessimism, charming through vulgarity, energetic through plotlessness, clear and strong through incoherence, never felt as intensely in their name-making achievements.
And then there's music, art. Tristan, La Pieta.
Anyway. Maybe this is just youth speaking to youth and in years to come I'll learn to love satire and the social novel. And Plato's God knows, there's nothing more disgusting than pre-midlife hypochondria over aging. But you age before you age, you know? And it frightens me.
People say they wish they were 18 again but the key word there is again. That was a high point of potential for many of us but mostly potential wasted through lack of knowledge. It's the 20s where you get it together, where every direction is up.
In literature 20-odds gave us A Tale of a Tub, Werther, The Pickwick Papers, Wuthering Heights, most of Sketches from a Hunter's Album, the Childhood trilogy, Sons and Lovers, Dubliners, Murphy, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Sound and the Fury, The Great Gatsby, The Crying of Lot 49, Welty's '30s stories; Aristophanes' best comedies, Marlowe's plays, Andromache, The Robbers, the Urfaust, Danton's Death, Love's Labor's Lost, possibly Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Putting aside Marlowe, Sidney, Keats, Shelley etc. there's Book I (and possibly Book II) of the Faerie Queene, Comus and most of Milton's best lyric work, Marvell's garden and love poems, the most poetic Pope poems (Rape of the Lock, Windsor Forest, Essay on Criticism, Eloisa to Abelard, An Unfortunate Lady), Blake's Poetical Sketches and maybe his Innocence songs, Wordsworth's most sublime and least irritating work, Coleridge's three or four masterpieces including The Rime, Byron's Romantic work, Beddoes' exquisite Bride's Tragedy, Tennyson's most powerful lyrics, Atalanta in Calydon etc. etc. And that's just among the British.
Many of these listed won't be considered their authors' greatest, yet all have appeal (to me, anyway) somehow outshining works even more profound and masterful produced in later life. Even with authors like Chekhov, Kafka, and Browning, where the earlier work is dramatically surpassed by the later, there's a not-quite definable something, a something optimistic even through pessimism, charming through vulgarity, energetic through plotlessness, clear and strong through incoherence, never felt as intensely in their name-making achievements.
And then there's music, art. Tristan, La Pieta.
Anyway. Maybe this is just youth speaking to youth and in years to come I'll learn to love satire and the social novel. And Plato's God knows, there's nothing more disgusting than pre-midlife hypochondria over aging. But you age before you age, you know? And it frightens me.
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-02 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-02 09:24 pm (UTC)