“When I was a boy of fourteen,” Mark Twain once famously wrote, “my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
To be honest, it took me a little longer to figure this out. I was probably about 25 or so.
You see, I thought all the problems of the world, and there were many – the Vietnam War, the assassinations, the race riots and, a bit later, Watergate – were caused solely by my parents’ generation and their ill-management of the world. I, on the other hand, was as pure as the wind-driven snow. I had it all together, so why didn’t the older generations? How could they not see what I saw? How could they have allowed things to get so out of hand? It was inexcusable.
Some years later I read the life story of Thomas Merton, the cloistered monk and renowned Christian author, who had been a brilliant, academically high-achieving young man living a kind of jaundiced, profligate lifestyle. He was cool, detached, worldly, and fashionably cynical – a real sophisticate. He valued aesthetics and big thoughts. And his highly refined critique of society was downright scathing.
