Youth and Life

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

I
YOUTH

How shall I describe Youth, the time of contradictions and anomalies? The fiercest radicalisms, the most dogged conservatisms, irrepressible gayety, bitter melancholy,—all these moods are equally part of that showery springtime of life. One thing, at least, it clearly is: a great, rich rush and flood of energy. It is as if the store of life had been accumulating through the slow, placid years of childhood, and suddenly the dam had broken and the waters rushed out, furious and uncontrolled, before settling down into the quieter channels of middle life. The youth is suddenly seized with a poignant consciousness of being alive, which is quite wanting to the naïve unquestioning existence of the child. He finds himself overpoweringly urged toward self-expression. Just as the baby, born into a “great, blooming, buzzing confusion,” and attracted by every movement, every color, every sound, kicks madly in response in all directions, and only gradually gets his movements coördinated into the orderly and precise movements of his elders,—so the youth suddenly born into a confusion of ideas and appeals and traditions responds in the most chaotic way to this new spiritual world, and only gradually learns to find his way about in it, and get his thoughts and feelings into some kind of order.

Fortunate the young man who does not make his entrance into too wide a world. And upon the width and depth of that new world will depend very much whether his temperament is to be radical or conservative, adventurous or conventional. For it is one of the surprising things about youth that it can so easily be the most conservative of all ages. Why do we suppose that youth is always radical? At no age are social proprieties more strictly observed, and Church, State, law, and order, more rigorously defended. But I like to think that youth is conservative only when its spiritual force has been spent too early, or when the new world it enters into is found, for some reason, to be rather narrow and shallow. It is so often the urgent world of pleasure that first catches the eye of youth; its flood of life is drawn off in that direction; the boy may fritter away his precious birthright in pure lightness of heart and animal spirits. And it is only too true that this type of youth is transitory. Pleasure contrives to burn itself out very quickly, and youth finds itself left prematurely with the ashes of middle age. But if, in some way, the flood of life is checked in the direction of pleasure, then it bursts forth in another,—in the direction of ideals; then we say that the boy is radical. Youth is always turbulent, but the momentous difference is whether it shall be turbulent in passion or in enthusiasm. Nothing is so pathetic as the young man who spends his spiritual force too early, so that when the world of ideals is presented to him, his force being spent, he can only grasp at second-hand ideals and mouldy formulas.

This is the great divergence which sets youth not only against old age, but against youth itself: the undying spirit of youth that seems to be fed by an unquenchable fire, that does not burn itself out but seems to grow steadier and steadier as life goes on, against the fragile, quickly tarnished type that passes relentlessly into middle life. At twenty-five I find myself full of the wildest radicalisms, and look with dismay at my childhood friends who are already settled down, have achieved babies and responsibilities, and have somehow got ten years beyond me in a day. And this divergence shows itself in a thousand different ways. It may be a temptation to a world of pleasure, it may be a sheltering from the stimulus of ideas, or even a sluggish temperament, that separates traditional and adventurous youth, but fundamentally it is a question of how youth takes the world. And here I find that I can no longer drag the traditional youth along with me in this paper. There are many of him, I know, but I do not like him, and I know nothing about him. Let us rather look at the way radical youth grows into and meets the world.

From the state of “the little child, to whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen of opaque and disconnected facts, the home a thing eternal, and ‘being good’ just simple obedience to unquestioned authority,” one steps suddenly into that “vast world of adult perception, pierced deep by flaring search-lights of partial understanding.”

The child has an utter sense of security; childhood is unconscious even that it is alive. It has neither fears nor anxieties, because it is incorrigibly poetical. It idealizes everything that it touches. It is unfair, perhaps, to blame parents and teachers, as we sometimes do in youth, for consciously biasing our child-minds in a falsely idealistic direction; for the child will infallibly idealize even his poorest of experiences. His broken glimpses and anticipations of his own future show him everything that is orderly, happy, and beautifully fit. He sees his grown-up life as old age, itself a sort of reversed childhood, sees its youth. The passing of childhood into youth is, therefore, like suddenly being turned from the cosy comfort of a warm fireside to shift for one’s self in the world. Life becomes in a moment a process of seeking and searching. It appears as a series of blind alleys, all equally and magnificently alluring, all equally real and possible. Youth’s thirst for experience is simply that it wants to be everything, do everything and have everything that is presented to its imagination. Youth has suddenly become conscious of life. It has eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

As the world breaks in on a boy with its crashing thunder, he has a feeling of expansion, of sudden wisdom and sudden care. The atoms of things seem to be disintegrating around him. Then come the tearings and the grindings and the wrenchings, and in that conflict the radical or the poet is made. If the youth takes the struggle easily, or if his guardian angels have arranged things so that there is no struggle, then he becomes of that conservative stripe that we have renounced above. But if he takes it hard,—if his struggles are not only with outward material conditions, but also with inner spiritual ones,—then he is likely to achieve that gift of the gods, perpetual youth. The great paradox is that it is the sleek and easy who are prematurely and permanently old. Struggle brings youth rather than old age.

In this struggle, thus beset with problems and crises, all calling for immediate solution, youth battles its way into a sort of rationalization. Out of its inchoateness emerges a sort of order; the disturbing currents of impulse are gradually resolved into a character. But it is essential that that resolution be a natural and not a forced one. I always have a suspicion of boys who talk of “planning their lives.” I feel that they have won a precocious maturity in some illegitimate way. For to most of us youth is so imperious that those who can escape the hurly-burly and make a sudden leap into the prudent, quiet waters of life seem to have missed youth altogether. And I do not mean here the hurly-burly of passion so much as of ideals. It seems so much better, as well as more natural, to expose one’s self to the full fury of the spiritual elements, keeping only one purpose in view,—to be strong and sincere,—than to pick one’s way cautiously along.

The old saying is the truest philosophy of youth: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” How impossible for a youth who is really young to plan his life consciously! This process that one sometimes sees of cautiously becoming acquainted with various ideas and systems, and then choosing deliberately those that will be best adapted to a concerted plan, is almost uncanny. This confidence in one’s immunity to ideas that would tend to disarrange the harmony of the scheme is mystifying and irritating. Youth talks of “getting” or “accepting” ideas! But youth does not get ideas,—ideas get him! He may try to keep himself in a state of spiritual health, but that is the only immunity he can rely upon. He cannot really tell what idea or appeal is going to seize upon him next and make off with him.

We speak as if falling in love were a unique phase in the life of youth. It is rather the pattern and symbol of a youth’s whole life. This sudden, irresistible seizure of enthusiasm that he cannot explain, that he does not want to explain, what is it but the aspect of all his experience? The youth sees a pretty face, reads a noble book, hears a stirring appeal for a cause, meets a charming friend, gets fired with the concept of science, or of social progress, becomes attracted to a profession,—the emotion that fixes his enthusiasm and lets out a flood of emotion in that direction, and lifts him into another world, is the same in every case. Youth glories in the sudden servitude, is content to let the new master lead wherever he will; and is as surprised as any one at the momentous and startling results. Youth is vulnerable at every point. Prudence is really a hateful thing in youth. A prudent youth is prematurely old. It is infinitely better, I repeat, for a boy to start ahead in life in a spirit of moral adventure, trusting for sustenance to what he may find by the wayside, than to lay in laboriously, before starting, a stock of principles for life, and burden himself so heavily for the journey that he dare not, and indeed cannot, leave his pack unguarded by the roadside to survey the fair prospects on either hand. Youth at its best is this constant susceptibility to the new, this constant eagerness to try experiments.