Split the difference
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about by the young, and that is not being understood by them at all. I sit here at five-and-forty, a curious fossil in my own artroom, my wardrobe a discreet protest against the vulgarities of fashion, my hair cut in the fashion of a decade that has already grown ashamed of itself. The mirror, that most faithful of liars, shows me a man suspended between two worlds—too old for the children who invent new tongues each season, too young for the elders who repeat the same tired maxims with the solemnity of oracles.
How monstrous it is to have been a parent while the world was still busy inventing its latest sins. I changed napkins and read bedtime stories while the under-thirties were busy being clever and coining words that now fall upon my ear like so much bright, meaningless music. Now my own teenagers move about me like exquisite, dangerous little gods, speaking a dialect I half-decipher and wholly envy. Fifteen, thirteen, eleven, nine—each a separate country, each despising the customs of the one before. Even the eldest cannot translate the youngest’s slang. The generations widen like cracks in a perfect vase; soon the whole thing will shatter, and we shall call it progress.
The tech of my youth was charmingly clumsy—brick-like telephones one carried with a certain pride, the screech of dial-up like a mechanical confession, MTV flickering with all the false promise of rebellion. My parents regarded it with the bewildered horror reserved for new religions. Now my children outstrip me with effortless cruelty, their thumbs dancing across screens I have never learned to master. I have no Snap, no TikTok; Instagram feels to me like the dull conversation of other people’s parents. I am become the thing I once pitied: an anachronism in my own house.
And yet the comedy repeats itself with perfect, heartless symmetry. My great-grandfather shuddered at the swivel of Elvis’s hips; my father recoiled from the barbarous thump of gangsta rap; I, in my turn, wince at this new cult of exposed flesh and autotuned vacancy. Tomorrow’s children will shudder at whatever fresh indecency blooms from the ruins, and we shall all pretend it matters. Youth corrupts, and age reveals the corruption. That is the only law.
We have lost the art of building cathedrals. The souls who knew the secret of stone have crumbled to dust, and we stand before their ruins with our clever machines, unable to raise even a decent spire. The pyramids gaze down upon us with the weary contempt of immortals. Engines rust in my driveway because I never learned their language; fields lie fallow because I cannot speak to the earth without steel and petroleum. AI remembers everything we have forgotten, yet it produces nothing beautiful. It is the perfect servant—faithful, soulless, and utterly without grace.
I can still recall telephone numbers from 1994. I can still write a sentence in cursive that flows like a forgotten melody. I can still perform small sums in my head without summoning the oracle of my telephone. These small, useless victories comfort me in the night. But they are the flowers of a pressed book—pretty, dead, and faintly ridiculous.
I speak easily with the old, who forgive my ignorance because they share my exile. I reach, clumsily, toward the young, who tolerate me because I pay the bills. But the thirty-somethings pass me by with polite indifference, as though I were a portrait already showing signs of decay in the attic—best kept out of sight, lest the truth of what we all become should spoil their appetite for life.
Ah, the terrible beauty of being between. One foot in yesterday’s grace, the other in tomorrow’s vulgarity. And the portrait in the attic? It grows older with every word I fail to understand.