![]() ![]() She notes that while there is often great friction between the young and the old, this friction can, “if rightly understood and considerately handled on both sides, take the form of mutual stimulus and attraction” - for it most often springs from a lack of understanding of each other’s state of being and frame of reference. The reasons by which people back up their prejudices are mostly negligible - not reason at all at bottom, but just instinctive self-justifications but prejudice, rising as it does in emotion, has its roots in life and reality. ![]() Harrison considers the rudiments of maturity and what makes us who we are by examining the “relations between fairly mature youth and quite early middle age,” defining the latter as “anything completely or hopelessly grown up - anything, say, well over thirty,” winking at the relativity of age with the memory of a time when a person of fourteen appeared to her child-self “utterly grown up.” Reflecting on the young scholar’s remark, and noting in herself with even greater alarm a similar “counter-prejudice” against youth, she observes: I am long past blame and praise, or, rather, I am not yet ready for them there is so much still waiting to be understood.Īnd so she set out to do just that in an entertaining, existentially profound essay titled “Crabbed Age and Youth,” published in her 1915 essay collection Alpha and Omega ( public library). In a sentiment that ought to be the ultimate manifesto for intellectual and emotional humility, direly needed in our own time, she adds: Give me an honest prejudice, and I am always ready to attend to it. It is my business to understand and, if I can, learn from it. ![]() Here we have, not a reasoned conclusion, but a real live emotion, a good solid prejudice, a genuine attitude of gifted Youth to Crabbed Age. This is really very interesting and extraordinarily valuable. That same year, Harrison was startled to hear one of her young, talented colleagues at Trinity College proclaim that “no one over thirty is worth speaking to.” With her winking intelligence, she observed: In her sixty-fifth year, as World War I was breaking out, Harrison reflected in a letter that “work & friendship come to be the whole of life.” As the ledger of her life grew thick with decades, she never lost her intellectual vivacity, her lively intergenerational friendships, her active engagement with the ever-pulsating world of scholars and artists - in no small part because of the life and love she shared with her significantly younger partner: the poet, novelist, and translator Hope Mirrlees. ![]() #DRESS ASSISTANT MAC FREE HOW TO#“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote as she considered how to keep life from becoming a parody of itself, while across the English Channel the ever-sagacious Bertrand Russell was offering his prescription for how to grow old and across the Atlantic the vivacious elderly Henry Miller was distilling the secret to remaining young at heart as a matter of being able to “fall in love again and again… forgive as well as forget… keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.”īut no one has approached the universal problem of advancing from youth to old age, or the dialogue between the two within a lifetime and across generations, more insightfully, delightfully, and with richer nuance than the great classics scholar and linguist Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928), whose extraordinary life I came upon in Francesca Wade’s altogether scrumptious book Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars ( public library) and whose work revolutionized the modern understanding of Ancient Greek culture by upending millennia of patriarchal revisionism with Harrison’s discovery of an entire class of “matriarchal, husbandless goddesses” central to community life and ritual. ![]()
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