Arthur C. Clarke liked to joke that, after he left his teens and his brains more or less gelled up, he was never really more than ten years old anyway.
He argued this because usually his daily life and working memory mostly focused on actions, events and memories from the last ten years of his experience and as he moved forward and grew older, this just kept shifting. He’d look back on books that he’d written outside this range and was surprised that he’d written them that way. The mental processes of the 30 year old author Clarke seemed strangely alien to him as an author at 50 or 60.
Then again this was the guy who gave us Against the Fall of Night and The City and the Stars. One of the main concepts in those stories was how to keep a human culture viable over a billion year time span. And a lot of it really has to do with diverting people’s attention. As creatures of nostalgia and short attention spans we are eager to forget history.
It has been interesting to recognize, as I sail through life, how little I’ve changed in some ways, even more than how much I have changed. In part, because nostalgia, but also because some things just get me in the gibblies. Star Wars— loved it since I saw ‘Empire’, love it just as much now. Doesn’t really matter that the movies aren’t as I remember them. It’s interesting, inherently, to see how I’ve changed, and how I react to them as an adult. It tells me a lot about myself as a kid.
When I was 22, I was amazed at how much wiser I had grown since 21. When I was 23, I was amazed that I had grown wiser *faster* over that year than I had the year previous. This continued until about age 27, and now every year feels exactly the same. I don’t know if those initial feelings were an illusion. I assumed that they were, and that the feeling would continue up until old age. The gaining of wisdom and shifting of opinion is not a steady process. Sometimes it’s slow. Sometimes it’s rapid-fire for a while. Sometimes it’s sudden and big. Am I different now then five years ago? Yes. Ten? Yes. Fifteen? Yes. Will I be different ten years from now? How about tomorrow? Probably yes. You might not be in an age of enlightenment like your early twenties but you are definitely still learning and growing as a person.
Maybe I’m just stuck in some sort of subconscious high school suppressed Gen X manchild stasis. Maybe this is the reason that golden era hip hop is like comfort food to me. Maybe Star Wars is just my ‘power animal’ and every time I watch the Death Star explode it says ‘slide’ to me.
Perhaps adulthood is when we begin to trust in all those old sayings and cliches, the ones that made us sigh and roll our eyes as kids. However, If I’m not changing, I’m not growing. If I’m not growing, I’m not learning. And if I’m not learning, I’m not living.
-Dagobot
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