On Youth

On Youth

Youth is idolized in our culture. It sells face creams, is represented and misrepresented in the media, and has been a theme is literature since the beginning of civilization. But what is youth? While it’s essence continues to evade us, literary works such as This Side of Paradise, Dandelion Wine, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem have all sought to represent it. In This Side of Paradise youth is shown to be naive unconditional belief in one’s self and one’s future. When Amory is young he believes he is destined for greatness. As he grows up however he is faced with a reality he is unprepared for, which offers crushing blows, such as failing a class and losing the love of his life to a richer man. At it’s heart Dandelion Wine is a story about the passing of life, from the promise of youth, through the varying contentedness of middle age, to the acceptance of old age. It portrays youth is a time to appreciate all the small miracles in life, a time of wonder and exploration that is eventually lost as life progresses, similar to the way the delight and shine of a new pair of sneakers fades into the mundane and ordinary. However Slouching Towards Bethlehem offers a different take on youth. While This Side of Paradise and Dandelion Wine represent youth as a period of life that has a time and place in one’s journey, Slouching Towards Bethlehem represents youth as a state of mind that can and should be maintained throughout one’s life. It rejects the conventions of a typical life and constantly seeks to improve the world around it until reality and it’s perceptions of reality match up, refusing to “accept what is” and instead constantly strives for the betterment of society.

Through its collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem offers us a different view on youth than the other two novels. With it’s vivid descriptions of counterculture in California in the 1960s, of Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, we see how youth is not just a period of time in one’s life. Instead it shows it as a state of mind where anything is possible and where there is always a way to make the world a better place. It lacks despair and maintains hope even in the worst of situations. This is most clearly shown in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In this essay we meet many young adults and teenegers living in drug-fueled San Francisco in the heart of counterculture. Despite having no jobs, no family, and no security in their day to day lives, they maintain a youthful carefreeness. As one character, Max, puts it, they are all “free of all the old middle-class Freudian hang ups.” (87-88), and their lives represent “a triumph over ‘dont’s’” (88). This attitude of living a life free from the constraints of society that we learn of as we get older reflects how, with youth, anything is possible. When we meet Joan Baez and her students at the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Where Kissing Never Stops we also see how youth results in an endless supply of hope or the betterment of the world and humanity. The students are full of ideals, with one pronouncing “The one thing in common is that we all want to live!” (59). Despite living during the years of the Vietnam War, the people that congregate at the Institute maintain a youthful hope in the world and in humanity.

While Slouching Towards Bethlehem offers an optimistic view on youth and how it evolves with time and age, This Side of Paradise offers a much more bleak description. The story of the life of Amory Blaine is one of unfulfilled dreams and disillusionment with the way the world works. As a young boy Amory is raised by his eccentric mother who has him travel with her around the United States. Amory is spends his childhood believing that anything is possible and that he is “a fortunate youth, capable of infinite expansion for good or evil” (12). However after his move to Minneapolis, where he fails to make friends with other children, and his time at prep school, where he also fails to achieve what he believes as his full potential, Amory is left with a sense of disappointment about life. This disappointment comes to a pinnacle when he fails a class at Princeton University and is forced to leave his position on the Princetonian Board. He then plunges into a pile of self-pity, considers dropping out, then is pulled into the fighting of the second World War. When he returns, Amory has lost his youth and is depressed with the world and what it has offered him. This dramatic change in perspective is indicative of