الشباب العمر من منظور التاريخ الثقافي

by Robert Pogue Harrison, روبرت بوغ هاريسون, شحدة فارع (Translator)

How old are you?  The more thought you bring to bear on the question, the harder it is to answer.  For we age simultaneously in different ways: biologically, psychologically, socially. And we age within the larger framework of a culture, in the midst of a history that predates us and will outlast us. Looked at through that lens, many aspects of late modernity would suggest that we are older than ever, but Robert Pogue Harrison argues that we are also getting startlingly younger—in looks, mentality, and behavior. We live, he says, in an age of juvenescence.
 
Like all of Robert Pogue Harrison's books, Juvenescence ranges brilliantly across cultures and history, tracing the ways that the spirits of youth and age have inflected each other from antiquity to the present. Drawing on the scientific concept of neotony, or the retention of juvenile characteristics through adulthood, and extending it into the cultural realm, Harrison argues that youth is essential for culture’s innovative drive and flashes of genius. At the same time, however, youth—which Harrison sees as more protracted than ever—is a luxury that requires the stability and wisdom of our elders and the institutions. “While genius liberates the novelties of the future,” Harrison writes, “wisdom inherits the legacies of the past, renewing them in the process of handing them down.”
 
A heady, deeply learned excursion, rich with ideas and insights, Juvenescence could only have been written by Robert Pogue Harrison. No reader who has wondered at our culture's obsession with youth should miss it.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Essays, Anthropology, World History, Cultural

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2014

About the author

Robert Pogue Harrison is a critic, radio host, and the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University. His most recent book is Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age.

Reviews

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once in a great while I stumble onto a new book by an author I'd forgotten, and discover his work all over again. Twenty years ago I got lost in Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests. In the next decade I brought home The Body of Beatrice and The Dominion of the Dead, read a chapter or two and buried them in the back of the book closet. A few days ago I came across Juvenescence and it has transformed my week, in part because it led me as well to Harrison's podcast Entitled Opinions which I have been enjoying immensely. This book wins an extra star just for that pleasure.

Juvenescence is the best book I've ever read on aging, tipping a whole shelf of self-help books onto the floor. "This book is at best ambivalent toward the unprecedented juvenescence that is sweeping over Western culture." Harrison doesn't question that "70 is the new 50" – but he does make us wonder if this is the Good Thing everyone supposes, particularly for the young.

our youth-obsessed society in fact wages war against the youth it presumably worships. It may appear as if the world now belongs mostly to the younger generations, with their idiosyncratic mindsets and technological gadgetry, yet in truth, the age as a whole, whether wittingly or not, deprives the young of what youth needs most if it hopes to flourish. It deprives them of idleness, shelter, and solitude, which are the generative sources of identity formation, not to mention the creative imagination. It deprives them of spontaneity, wonder, and the freedom to fail.

Here Harrison has articulated a host of my own inchoate ruminations. Over the last few years I've watched the San Francisco I loved disappear, replaced by the purr of high-tech buses pouring back into the city from Silicon Valley late at night, dropping serious twenty-somethings onto almost deserted streets, streets that used to throng with hippies, drag queens, activists and artists. I marvel at millennials buying condos in this unaffordable city; then I remember how I survived my 20s & 30s on temp jobs, surrounded by a wealth of friends, books, bars and cafés, when conversations (and much else) wandered into the wee hours. I don't envy the young, any more than they would envy me.

Harrison posits a polarity between youthful Genius and older Wisdom. His development of this theme is interesting but not always convincing. Twice (pp. 30, 132), while arguing for the critical importance of solitude and passionate thinking in our Genius years, he cites Poe's hypnotic poem "Alone."

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still.

But Poe's poem does not stop after "still" – instead after an em dash it wends its way into real weirdness:

From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—

Poe was haunted. For a generation that grew up with Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, that's apparent – but maybe this is a point Harrison doesn't want to press too hard.

If you've followed this review this far, I'll throw in a final snippet, a passage that will ring true to anyone in middle age (or beyond, I expect) who revels in the unfathomable richness of reading.

Such is the paradox of human age in the cultural sphere: we get younger by becoming older. One of the blessings of the human condition, which is otherwise tragic and fraught with afflictions of every sort, is that, once it gets underway, the learning process never comes to an end, or at least never need come to an end.

Harrison also cites a poem by D.H. Lawrence, which concludes with the line "Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending." Surely he has described himself.

[hayatem · Rating 4 out of 5]

"إن غريزة الخوف تدفعنا لاكتساب المعرفة"
—نيتشه.

مالعمر؟ ماهي أعمارنا حقاً؟ كم تبلغ الفصائل البشرية من السن؟ كيف نقيس العمر من وجهة نظر تاريخية - بيولوجية- ثقافية؟ كيف يرتبط عمر الإنسان باختراقه عالم المعاني؟ ماهو العمر من وجهة نظر دارون؟ هل الزمن وهم؟ كيف ترى الفلسفة العمر ؟ ماهو مقياس العمر لدى هيدغر؟ ماذا كان يقصد فرويد حين قال " التركيب البنيوي هو القدر"؟ لماذا يحمل مفهوم الشباب بمنظوره المختلف والمعقد كل هذا الزخم في الفكر الفلسفي؟ مالحكمة؟ ما مفهومها؟ كيف تكتسبها؟ هل هي مناطة بالتقدم في العمر؟ ماهي المفارقة بين الحكمة والعبقرية ؟ هل نكبر ونبقى أطفال من الداخل؟ ما أثر الطفولة في التقدم بالعمر ؟ ماهو مفهوم حب العالم من وجهة نظر هاريسون ؟ هل نحب العالم حقاً؟

الكتاب متنوع في المضمون من حيث موضاعاته ومفرداته ذات المدلولات الثقافية الغنية بالمعاني، والمثيرة في ذات الوقت للكثير من الشكوك والتساؤلات .

[Jana Light · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a delightfully odd and engaging book this is! Although I can't quite categorize what Harrison is doing here (historical philosophy? psychology? sociology?), his overall point seems to be that Western developmen is deeply neotenic: old but with distinct characteristics of the young, a product of fresh insight that rejuvenates, rather than annihilates, the legacy of the past. Sounds rather obvious, right? That's part of the allure of this book -- Harrison states familar or self-evident concepts in a way that feels utterly fresh. (If I may be a bit pedantic, his book is a practice in the very neoteny for which he argues.) He applies his neotenic framework to Western psychological, intellectual, historical, and cultural developments and revolutions and manages to make a convincing and thorough case in a remarkably economical number of pages.

Perhaps my favorite of Harrison's analyses was his argument that Western (and perhaps human) development is becoming confused in the 21st century. The rapidity and increasing-complexity of technological advancement means that we can no longer assimilate the disruptive "genius" breakthroughs with the foundational "wisdom" of the past. Western thinking and culture is becoming more fractured than ever before, and we tend to toss aside the past in favor of the new and the shiny.

I have to say: at times it felt that beneath his academic and insightful analysis, Harrison was partially driven by a curmudgeonly frustration at the pace of the Western world's fast-paced technological development and aggressive devotion to the new. These aspects of Western culture certainly have their downsides (many of which Harrison illuminated), but at times he seemed a touch irritated. Whether my intuition is adrift, however, is certainly up for update.

Harrison makes clear that his analysis is of Western thought and cultural development, and as such I couldn't help but wonder how the idea of neoteny applies to Eastern thought and cultural development. I definitely have some additional reading to do.

Beyond the ideas, this book is worth reading for the examples alone. Harrison pulls heavily from Western literature to make his points, and that is always a welcome strategy in my world. In addition, Harrison's writing style is elegant, quiet, refined, and enjoyable to read in its own right. Ultimately, I think I like the fact that I don't quite know what to do with this book. It means the ideas are still turning over and over in my brain and will inevitably pop up from time to time in the way I see and analyze the world around me.

[John Pistelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded and decease.
—Emerson, “Circles” (1841)

I’m filled with the sadness that afflicted the Roman patricians of the fourth century: I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth.
—Flaubert to Turgenev (1872)

Robert Pogue Harrison has been called "the single most significant writer in the humanities today," heir to Auerbach, so I thought I had better read this new book! A relatively short (150-page) essay in cultural interpretation, Juvenescence has a profound but simple thesis, which can be arranged in three parts:

1. Humans are the only animals whose age is complicated by our being born into culture, a set of institutions that reach back behind our birth and out beyond our death; thus, our age is not simply biological but cultural.

2. Cultural renewal comes about by synthesizing the brash ambition of youth (which Harrison calls "genius") with the custodial stewardship of age (which Harrison calls "wisdom"), so that every genuine renewal—a “neotenic revolution” in Harrison’s vocabulary—preserves the past by revivifying it and making it live anew. Juvenescence, or the strong capacity for neotenic revolution, may be the hallmark of the modern period, beginning with Dante’s reinvention of the Classical past.

3. The current period (Harrison dates it to the end of World War II) makes neotenic revolution difficult or impossible to achieve because it deracinates the young from the past, even though youth's transformation of tradition is all that can bring about a viable future. Today, the past is blocked from consciousness by the buzz and hum of a coercive techno-culture that interrupts the youth’s inner dialogue with the dead by constantly thrusting the flashily (and merely) new into the budding mind. In distinction to juvenescence, Harrison labels our cultural-death-by-techology juvenilization, which paradoxically makes us senile, or unable to recall our history.

Harrison’s method is an old-fashioned one, hence the Auerbach comparison: he seeks to understand our world not by running empirical studies or quoting the latest authorities, but by critically interpreting the philosophical and literary tradition. Much of his essay's argument proceeds from a bravura reading of the chorus’s Ode on Man in Sophocles’s Antigone, the poles of which ambiguous ode—which pictures humanity as unparalleled adventurer and as shipwreck waiting to happen—provides Harrison with his own ambivalent vision of human neoteny as both creator and destroyer of culture.

Harrison is guided in his speculations by the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose theory of cultural cycles gives a structure to Harrison’s own theory of how wisdom and genius interact to remake the “world,” or the institutional framework that gives individual life its meaning and value. Harrison’s method is humanistic, and his book is a defense of the humanities. Writing from Stanford, perhaps the capital of contemporary American society’s techno-corruption, Harrison insists that culture requires strenuous engagement with its own past if it is to have a future. His tone throughout is gentle—much gentler than mine would be were I to write such a book—but his polemic against the disruptors of techno-commercialism comes through clearly.


Harrison’s defense of humanism against scientism licenses a poetic rather than expository writing style; among the poets and sages he quotes, he is clearly most indebted to Emerson as a lyrical praiser of human capacity within limitation:

A nation can build for the future, invest in the future, and undertake industrial, social, or technological projects for the future, yet if it does not find ways to metabolize its past, it remains without genuine prospects. That means that its youth remains largely stagnant, culturally speaking. The greatness of Western civilization, for all its disfiguring vices, consists in the fact that it has repeatedly found ways to regenerate itself by returning to, or fetching from, its nascent sources. The creative synergy between Western wisdom and Western genius has always taken the form of projective retrieval—of birthing the new from the womb of antecedence. Thus retrieval, in this radical sense, has little to do with revival and everything to do with revitalization.

Note how Harrison linguistically performs his own thesis by embedding the business cliche “creative synergy” within a much longer history, without which the west’s own reckless impetuosity, signaled by the dire MBA-speak phrase, would be difficult to comprehend. Harrison’s revenge upon his polemical enemies is, in the classic way of philosophy, to circumscribe them within his own larger consciousness. As David W, Price writes in the review linked in my first sentence, “Harrison has written a book that enacts what it describes, one which boldly explores new ideas through revitalizing the past.”

The centerpiece of Juvenescence is a set of case studies demonstrating how cultural renewal has happened throughout western history. The four examples are 1. Plato’s founding of philosophy, which he accomplishes by arrogating the pre-philosophical mythical conception of the world to philosophy’s own origin, thus giving philosophy an origin more ancient than the paganism it displaces; 2. the rise of Christianity, a movement that, beginning with Paul’s own efforts, incorporates and subsumes three prior traditions—Judaism, Greco-Roman religion, and Greek philosophy; 3. the European Enlightenment, in which humanity becomes young by freeing itself from tradition even as it comes of age by learning to think for itself; 4. the inception of the United States and its democratic renewal with the Civil War, the first of which events created a totally novel polity by encoding a mature mistrust of youthful impetuosity into the balance-of-power founding documents, and the second of which renewed that polity by stressing that the founding documents, to remain relevant, would have to endure the contestation of their meaning through bloody human struggle. This chapter on neotenic revolutions is the most compelling in the book, and its concluding praise for the American experiment could not be more sadly relevant.

Harrison ends his book somewhat optimistically, by imagining a future when adults, even if techno-barbarism has robbed them in younger years of a humanistic education, go back to school to renew their youth by discovering the wisdom of the ages. That seems too cheery to me—some in gated communities may do so, but what is it to those outside the gate? His pessimism, however he mutes it, speaks more clearly to my own experience. I have tried to embody both his optimism and his pessimism in the dueling epigraphs to this review; let me conclude by quoting a pessimistic passage at length, to give the devil (or Flaubert) his due. In the following paragraphs, Harrison looks back to dark-age discontinuities in culture, and implies that our own juvenilization is leading us to such a chasm:

These recurring ruptures in the cultural continuum—ruptures that bring about “dark ages” of destitution, oblivion, and institutional collapse—seem frequent enough to lend at least allegorical credence to Plato’s parable about heavenly declinations. Today we have the privilege of seeing this volcanic process at work up close, in Technicolor, as it were, as the entire Christian-humanist civilization that slowly consolidated itself in the wake of Rome’s collapse unravels before our eyes. It was said of President James Garfield that in moments of boredom or to amuse his friends he would take a pencil in each hand and compose sentences in Greek and Latin at the same time. If one considers that, as a student, Thomas Jefferson used to translate the Greek Bible into Latin, and vice versa, one realizes to what extent the “heavenly declinations” have unleashed their fury upon the American political class of late. It was not so long ago that a university professor in the classroom would typically leave Greek and Latin quotes untranslated. Then he began to provide translations for the Greek but not the Latin. Nowadays he must tell students that there were once such things as the Greek and Latin tongues, that there was once a place called Athens, and so forth. Shortly the professor won’t know even that much. Or he’ll know it, in a way, but not what to make of it, and when you don’t know what to make of something you eventually forget about it.

Why these periodic ruptures in the cultural continuum? In the Timaeus Plato attributes Greek rejuvenilization to heavenly declinations, yet we should keep in mind that civilizations are brought down not only by external enemies or natural forces but sometimes collapse from within, by virtue of their own heaviness. Our age shows that a loss of cultural memory can come about despite—or maybe even because of—an excessive remembering and cataloguing of the past. The more historical knowledge we accumulate—the more we overload the vast data banks of our digital memory with information about the past—the more its essential legacies slip through the cracks of our living memory. We should also bear in mind that the more our cultural memory begins to crack, the more vulnerable we become to heavenly declinations, that is, to nature’s fluctuations and eruptions. Youth has several virtues, yet providing for the future is not one of them.

One way to prevent such regression is to write and to read books such as Juvenescence.

[Ahmed Taha]

مقتطفات من الكتاب

11
الموضوع بيفكرني بحال الناس في عالمنا العربي بعد نجاح الثورات وحالهم بعد فشلها .. من الشعور بالانتماء للوطن ثم فجأة الشعور بالكره والاشمئزاز
الأصل إن الإنسان خُلق لعمارة الأرض وإن الكوكب مسئوليتنا .. لكن احنا Humans of late capitalism قاتل الله الناس اللي فوق على قدر ظلمهم


25
حصل


31
مع كثرة مقتطفات نيتشه اللي بشوفها مؤخرا بيتثمل لي في صورة غسان مطر مع حزلئوم


33


43


60
في سياق آخر يقول د أحمد خالد توفيق رحمه الله : ".أنت لست مهماً كما تعتقد..لست مهماً على الإطلاق"


166


167
راجع المقتطف الأول


176-177-178
موضوع مهم
يذكرني برواية 1984 .. الأخ الأكبر يراقبك




184


هو أنا بتسائل شكل الكتاب ممكن يكون ازاي لو الكاتب استعان بالتاريخ الثقافي للجانب الشرقي من العالم ودياناته، وكان غير مؤمن بنظرية التطور

[Doa'a Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

ما هو عمر العمر؟؟ هذا الكتاب يبحث في التاريخ الثقافي لفكرة العمر، تعريفات الطفولة والشباب والكهولة وخصائص كل مرحلة .... ابتداء من عمر الإنسان البيولوجي ( هل الإنسان كائن دائم الطفولة)؟ كونه يتميز عن باقي الحيوانات بخاصية التعلم واللدونة العصبية اللي خلقت اللغة والابداع والحضارة والثقافة ... هذه الجزئية من الكتاب رهيبة جدا وثورية ! خاصة لو قارنا بين بشر الان وبشر العصور القديمة .. كم الامور عليك تعلمها لتكون بالغا وهل ستصل فعلا ام ستبقى في حالة من التعليم لمواكبة العصر ! كيف يتمركز الإنسان حول ذاته بطفولة نفسية قد تطول وكيف يخرج للمجتمع ويندمج عبر الشعور بتميز خصائصه عن غيره ...

هناك الكثير من المصطلحات والمفاهيم التي تتعلق بالعمر، مثل الحكمة والعبقرية والثورة .. وما يلازمها من دور تقوم به للمجتمع المحلي او العالمي وحصيلة التفكير البشري ..

الكتاب زاخر باستشهادات من الأدب والفلسفة وبعض السياسة .. لكنه حاول عدم الاطالة او التحذلق اللغوي ..

اعجبني وشعرت انه بجد مميز بفكرته وطرحه .. ولكن التركيز طبعا كان ع العالم الغربي وحضارة العالم الحديث كوليد لكل الثقافات او ظل ثنائي الابعاد لها مما يجعلها مثيرة للانتساب لها نظرا لسهولتها وعدم تعقيدها ونظرا لميل الثقافات العميقة للتحرر من اعبائها مع مرور الاجيال .. فهل نحن الآن أصغر من كل الأزمان السابقة وذلك للمفارقة رغم امتلاكنا كل حكمتهم المدونة ؟؟

[Sahar Samhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

أميل جدا لهذا النوع من القراءات في التاريخ الثقافي للظواهر التي تفتح أذهاننا على مستويات عميقة من التفكير وتتبع طريقة تطور تفكير البشر ونظرتهم إلى الحياة،...
كم عمرنا؟ سؤال بسيط ولكن الإجابة عنه ليست بالأمر اليسير: تطرق الكاتب إلى نظرية عمر الإنسان بكل دقائقها فالإنسان يمتلك عمراً بيولوجياً وتطورياً وجيولوجياً وثقافياً أيضاً،.. اكتسبت الخاتمه شيئا من الرومانسية لكن الطرح كان ممتاز من حيث العمق و الاختصار دون الحاجة إلى التطويل المبالغ فيه

[Stephen Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harrison’s “Juvenescence” has been a wonderful book to read and think through. While I don’t necessarily agree with every point he makes, there is an enormous wealth of fuel here to keep The Inner Fire burning bright.

The concept of neoteny and its role in the propagation of culture and society from generation to generation is a novel idea riddle with the wisdom of the past. The chapter “Amor Mundi” allowed Harrison to show off his most beautiful humanistic feathers and reframed the motivations and methods behind educating the young and growing old.

And really to his credit in my opinion, he never goes so far as to condemn our current age to oblivion, but he still illuminates certain modern tendencies that seem to have no precedent in history; a scary notion to those who mine the caverns of the past to help comprehend the present and future.

[Rhys]

"While genius liberates the novelties of the future, wisdom inherits the legacies of the past, renewing them in the process of handing them down" (p.41).

Renaissance and reformation, enlightenment, revolution, romanticism, even postmodernism have always been tempered by conservatism and tradition. The yang to the yin.

Harrison, however, seems not to have the stomach for the genius of revolution until it has been consolidated by the wisdom of tradition. He is more concerned about what comes after Thermidor, it seems. "To be more specific, I understand cultural neoteny as a highly variegated process of rejuvenation whereby older legacies assume newer or younger forms, thanks to a synergy between the synthetic forces of wisdom and the insurgent forces of genius" (p.72).

If nothing else, it has made me want to read Vico's New Science.

[Samuel Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wise and insightful, this book will bear multiple readings. Where Charles Taylor comes at these questions of what makes our contemporary society so strange and perhaps so lost from the perspective of philosophy and theology, Harrison--my favorite living literary critic--comes at the question from the perspective of our "ages." Like a good poem, this book is allusive and sometimes a little exasperating, functioning mostly to point out areas for further thought or to reframe debates and discussions. But like a good poem, this book is a soulful delight for a few quiet hours of reading and wondering.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting concepts, but it seems the author is more intent on trying to impress us with an array of disparate historical and cultural references than he is with presenting us with a concise, persuasive proof of concept of juvenescence.

[Jerry Wall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fascination with youth as we age and get older. Some imitate teenagers past time when it is
seemly. Some pass through youth at the command of circumstances. But, whatever, the young with smiling untouched faces and high spirits seem to be having fun.

The past does not cease to exist simply because we lose our memory of it p. xii
Nietzsche asks what people really want when they seek out knowledge. His answer: Nothing more that this : something strange is to be reduced to something familiar. p. 11
Sophocles Antigone -- There is much that is strange, but nothing / that surpasses man in strangeness. p. 13
Antigone -- unburied bodies mean unfinished business. p. 14
Ernst Haeckel famous theory of recapitulation -- ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny i. e. individuals in their fetal development repeat or pass through the various stages of their species' evolution. p. 16
Wordsworth 1802 poem My Heart Leaps up" the child is father to the man . p 35
Montaigne . . . with age, a person more often retreats into prejudice, pettiness, and petulance than blossoms with sagacity. p. 45
Kant -- Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. p. 94
The Constitution does not seek to create a just government but to place limit after limit upon government's power to encroach upon the freedom and right of individuals. p. 103
. . . what purpose will be served by educating these older "resurgent learners, as I would call them? It will serve no purpose at all, except the enhancement of life. . . . . life is learning. p. 143

[Benji · Rating 5 out of 5]

'“Human maturity has its source in the youth it brings to fruition. The deeper the source, the more extravagant the growth, which is another way of saying that human youth, in its neotenic relay, makes possible a capacity for spiritual maturation that has no equivalent in the animal kingdom, insofar as it opens humankind up to a wide range of psychic, and not merely organic, modes of being. When it comes to our species-being, this is the deeper meaning of the otherwise trite phrase “The child is the father of the man.”'

'“What remains to be done is to examine in detail, with reference to specific examples, the way wisdom and genius have worked together in the past to bring veritable “neotenic revolutions.”'

“A nation can build for the future, invest in the future, and undertake industrial, social, or technological projects for the future, yet if it does not find ways to metabolize its past, it remains without genuine prospects. That means that its youth remains largely stagnant, culturally speaking. The greatness of Western civilization, for all its disfiguring vices, consists in the fact that it has repeatedly found ways to regenerate itself by returning to, or fetching from, its nascent sources. The creative synergy between Western wisdom and Western genius has always taken the form of projective retrieval—of birthing the new from the womb of antecedence. Thus retrieval, in this radical sense, has little to do with revival and everything to do with revitalization.”

[Maged EL Pasha · Rating 1 out of 5]

very boring

[Marwa]

Senescence

عبد الله المقيت؛ علم ؛ الحسيب
قبل؛ امتداد الطفولة
الطفل بجانب العجوز

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly thought provoking!

[Shereen Adel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind-blowing...

[David Huff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever have that moment when you discover a book is much deeper, and far different, that what you originally might have thought? Such was my pleasurable experience with Robert Pogue Harrison's thoughtful writing. He makes a compelling case for "cultural maturity", which in our age of technological advance requires maintaining our connections with the wisdom of the past. He speaks of balancing "genius"- the forward looking drive to invent, discover and create, with "wisdom" -- our endowment from the past, including laws, scriptures, poetry, and literature. As he succinctly notes, "while genius liberates the novelties of the future, wisdom inherits the legacies of the past, renewing them in the process of handing them down"

One of Harrison's concerns is that the technological pace of our culture -- our "young" society, so to speak, is blurring that essential continuity with the past; this is an aspect (among several others) of the condition he calls juvenescence, creating in his words "orphans, rather than heirs, of history". He goes on to give a few specific examples of "neotenic" (a great word) revolutions: "the rise of Socratic philosophy, the triumph of Christianity in the ancient world, the European Enlightenment, and the founding of the American republic."

This is one of those books that will expand your thinking, and give you new appreciation and insight for what Russell Kirk called the Permanent Things. It's not a light summer read, but well worth the time invested.

[Alanood Burhaima · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If education has a goal, it is to increase the age of young people exponentially-- to make them hundreds, if not thousands, of years older than they were when they entered the classroom or sat down with their students' lamp to enlarge their mind. For it is through books, or other forms of writing, that a culture transmits the inner core of its historical age"

I have been listening to Robert's radio show for quite some time now and I can't help but imagine his voice as I read this. Great book.

[Robert W Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply profound and profoundly simple

A meaningful, moving synthesis of human life as experienced individually and culturally. A highly intelligent book that yet is easy to read and, amazingly, hard to put down. I intend to purchase a hardcover copy to read again, allowing me to mark important, provocative passages. "Juvenescence" has been great for my senescence. A must read for anyone with serious questions about our contemporary time and culture.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this aloud from the armchair in the bedroom, to my beloved consort, over the course of several wintry weekends. Reading in this way made it impossible to scrutinize the text closely, so I really can’t say whether it is utterly persuasive. It was, however, certainly an enjoyable book to read—and as I am generally sympathetic to the author’s (entitled) opinions, it was convincing enough for me.

[Win Dunwell]

Striking initial impression - same size book as previous but half the words with larger font and different format. But it's all about content which considering the author I expect intelligent excellence.

[Sam Koenen · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are phenomenal parts (5 stars), and some truly horrendous parts (1 star), but overall it is a solid and enlightening cultural theory with profound implications for classical teachers.

[James Kozubek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is insightful, and original. I especially like his critique of philosophy of time.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book for teenagers.

[Smarlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's more like a 3.5 to me.
In short, I don't quite enjoy the style of the writing (nostalgia tone), but the points and perspective the author brings out are very interesting, especially the discourse of the part about neoteny.