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)]

Yes, that's why I've resisted the Eggers book -- it sounded like its appeal was basically adolescent. There has been adolescent literature for a long time; the difference now is that the whole culture is so youth-oriented that no one points out that adolescent literature is not necessarily suitable for adults. (We won't even talk about movies...)

Steve

I wouldn't say youth-otiented

[iliat.livejournal.com]

...but maybe more infantile. It seems to me that more and more protagonists of the modern literature exhibit and unprecedented degree of infantilism and immaturity while the plot and the author are convincing us that this is a) facinating b) the right way to be. I guess this is an understandable trend that just reflects the same trend in real life.