We are a little wearied, in fact, by the solemnity with which Mr. Osborn accepts the youthful mind and the youthful point of view. “Youth knows more about the young,” he says, “than old age or middle age.” If this were so, civilization would be impossible, experience worthless.
TS. Eliot
Cashing in on a thirty-year crush —
you can’t be young and do that,
you can’t be young and do that.
James McMurtry
In 1973, I injured my knee in a pavement lift, one of those rickety old elevators that rise from the basement to the sidewalk like a shuttle from the netherworld. The mishap occurred on West 112th Street in New York, down the block from Tom’s Restaurant in the years before it came to bask in the glory of narcissistic young comics. I was living in a communal residence for Jewish students at Columbia University which some friends and I had recently established. Rising to the surface of the street my leg was brutally jammed into a metal shelf that connected the metal shutters that had been thrown open for my ascent. The doctors told me that I would have to walk with a cane for several months. Those months turned out to be a cognitive expansion, an existential correction, from which I am still profiting.