In the July 22 issue of The New Republic, Margaret Talbot demolishes Carol Gilligan and her latest book, The Birth of Pleasure, at considerable length; in the course of so doing, she produces the following impeccable definition of what it is to grow up, mentally and spiritually:
“But the cult of the young, the reverence for spontaneity, the romance of incomplete socialization: all this is itself a kind of immaturity. As most people get older, they realize that the first thing that they say or think is not always the truest thing; that their first thoughts are not usually their best thoughts; that what they write in a diary is not necessarily betrayed by what they say out loud; that the edited self, or the polished thought, is not an inferior or corrupted copy of a deeper, truer, better self. They realize that the truth that a child knows about divorce, say, or more generally about the social conventions of adults, is not a superior truth but a partial one, important to know and to credit, but necessarily occluded, like a glimpse through a crack in a door. The Catcher in the Rye is no longer their favorite book.”
Of course, many people get older without ever growing up.
Archives for August 2002
GROWING UP.
August 1, 2002 by Leave a Comment
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