Friends,
This is the most viral tweet I’ve ever posted. By a full order of magnitude.
May you never have a tweet travel beyond your cozy circle, because it’s weird out there. Many people chiming in with variations of if this is the peak you have a sad life.
If so, the sadness is a distant second to taking tweets too seriously.
If the expectation is to be serious, let’s do this.
I do not think being 13 is the peak of life. I would never want to be a child. This scene is not about who they are. But it’s without a doubt a peak neurochemical moment. Pure presence. No past, no future. You can have those moments at any age. It’s that tv commercial with the old ladies. A sense of aliveness that an advanced age makes you appreciate even more because, frankly, they’re just more scarce.
Their abundance of those moments in childhood makes them no less valuable. Part of our impulse to preserve their innocence is the luxury of extending this window of abundance. We recognize the tragedy of a child forced to grow up too early. The period of being “default present” is stolen.
If you’re even sparingly online (ha ha, there’s zero of you in that camp substack reader), you know The Odyssey has spawned every kind of take. One that I think a lot about is the contrast between:
a) the pagan Greek point of view that Homer intended (at least from what I’ve read, I’m not a student of the classics). Odysseus relished victory, glory and being a trickster.
b) The Christian sensibility Nolan put on the story by infusing Odysseus with a modern conscience. Pangs of remorse and self-doubt that one might feel if they found moral provenance in The Ten Commandments.
Nietzsche thought Christianity espoused what he called a “slave morality”. He saw its emphasis on compassion, elevating the weak or oppressed as an inversion of natural law. Very Darwinian. Homeric even.
I find all of this fascinating in a “one day I’m going to read more philosophy and religion and metaphysics” kind of way, but the reaction to the photo above and Odyssey discourse was a real-time collision. Since I ain’t trying to deal with a self-reckoning just this moment (it’s never a good time to self-reckon, it’s more of something you do at the end of a plank because it’s the only thing left to do) I retreat into remembering that I’m at peace with my prickly incoherence.
I’m not particularly attached to the idea of afterlife. Maybe a grandkid will be the last person who ever speaks my name. So be it. To live for your time on Earth with no expectation of eternity is a Greek impulse. This is also echoed in The Rest of History podcast episode on Sparta.
[This isn’t to say legacy itself doesn’t matter. The ancients might want to live on in terrestrial song if there was no heaven, so glory was a means to secure immortality in the oral tradition.]
Fully lacking any God-fearing incentives, unleashed to indulge every libertine urge, and womp, friggin womp, my personal code is…the Golden Rule. As Christian as my last name’s literal translation (“servant of the Messiah”). Actually, my personal code is the zeroth commandment which pretty much rhymes with the Golden Rule.
So yeah, it’s entirely true that the peak experience of having a physical body is not the most important thing in life. But that doesn’t make it any less of a maximum in what it means to be human. Something about a 13-year-old not knowing how high that moment is makes it even more special to us observers jaded to the point of debating it.
20k people smashed a like button because they recognize the universal in their heart.
[Ok fine, 19k bots swept up in the turbulence of an algo that broke containment.]
I leave you with an extended quote by author Ursula LeGuinn on maturity and growing up (emphasis mine):
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom…
Our job in growing up is to become ourselves. We can’t do this if we feel the task is hopeless, nor if we’re led to think there isn’t any work to it. Growth will be stunted or perverted if a child is forced to despair or encouraged in false security, terrified or coddled. What we need to grow up is reality, the wholeness which exceeds human virtue and vice. We need knowledge; we need self-knowledge. We need to see ourselves and the shadows we cast. For we can face our own shadow; we can learn to control it and to be guided by it; so that when we grow into our strength and responsibility as adults in society, we will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what we see, when we must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we all must bear, and the final shadow at the end of all.