Topic
Youth arrives in this collection primarily as a resource being wasted or as a condition being looked back on. Twain's crime-to-waste-youth-on-children is the most often misunderstood entry: it is not a complaint about children but a lament about the mismatch between youth's energy and children's wisdom. Wilde's young-know-everything is the satirical description of a real phenomenon. Ebner-Eschenbach offers the chronological correction: in youth we learn, in age we understand — the learning is not the same as the comprehension that arrives later. Hoover's blessed-young-for-inheriting-the-debt is the political observation that never loses its relevance. The age-boundary proverbs — forty as old age of youth, fifty as youth of old age — map the transitions with the precision of people who have survived them. Defoe on middle age is the most architecturally satisfying entry: youth without levity, age without decay. Kafka's line on the ability to see beauty rounds the collection: youth is not a chronological condition but a perceptual one, and some people never lose it.