о взрослении и культе детства

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Интересная рецензия в The New Republic на новую книгу американского социолога Carol Gilligan; рецензия, судя по всему, интереснее самой книги. LanguageHat приводит отличную цитату из этой статьи, идеально совпадающую с моими собственными мыслями на эту тему, включая и (очень уместное!) упоминание "Над пропастью во ржи" Сэлинджера:

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.

Один из таких случаев, когда автор говорит именно то, что я сам хотел бы сказать, но лучше, чем мне бы удалось.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Well said, but another aspect to maturity, I sometimes feel,
is that getting older you began to doubt there is a truth in the first place.

The truth of the young is limited, but strengthened by
unquestionable, absolute believe in its exsistence.