Reality Bites Hard

A. twentysomething anticipates the golden years.

Last year, weary of the young Turks at Harvard, I decided that I needed a change of social scenery. My subsequent adventures with a gaggle of septuagenarians provided what would ultimately be reconnaissance missions into the dark and hithertho unexplored territory of Individual Retirement Accounts. They also provided me with a new appreciation for my twentysomething contemporaries.

When the relatively youthful Clinton-Gore team triumphed in the last presidential election, the stakes were raised for the members of Generation X. The message was clear: if we weren't ruling the world by the time we were thirty, we could legitimately be perceived as failures.

Other than providing an opportunity for a reprise, no matter how contrived, of Camelot, the Clinton victory reinforced the singular definition of youth as that place where everything is possible. Age (and Bush's defeat) were represented as that place where one is constrained by limitations.

The onset of physical and mental decline, and the accompanying limitations, provide the main reason why so many of us dread the prospect of growing old. In this culture, aging is portrayed as a time when people become implicated in elaborate (and often not wholly effective) subterfuges which often involve the application of assorted unguents and Grecian Formula.

So when columnist Frank Rich '71 in last Sunday's New York Times witheringly dismissed the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition as a corporate conspiracy whose "true allure derives from their implicit celebration of the old older in which men call the shots and women submit without protest", he missed the meta-significance of the event.

Sports Illustrated's annual display of female pulchritude is a paean to youthfulness and its endless possibilities. This is consistent with the magazine's essential function, which is to capture and immortalize athletes in their prime.

This enduring need to remember people at the pinnacle of their accomplishments drove the public interest in Dan Jansen's and Diann Roff-Steinrotter's quest for gold. These athletes, in the autumn of their youth, were afforded one last chance in the Winter Olympics.

This is not to say that the later years consist of a sterile way station filled with terrified passengers en route to senescence. But the fact is the process of aging involves experience gained at the cost of closed avenues and yielded opportunities.

And, perhaps most painfully, faces and bodies which have been ravaged by time reveal too much of history, especially when old orders are in the process of being dismantled.

Consequently, no attempt to reconstruct approaches to aging will change this ineluctable fact. Betty Friedan tries valiantly in her book, The Fountain of Age, to reformulate society's attitude towards aging. Because aging, with its attendant existential dilemmas marks the beginning of the end, these attempts will always be futile. We do not want to go quietly the night.

I stooped to watch coltish first-years frolicking in the Yard during last weekend's reprieve from winter. Perched on the cusp of real accomplishment, they were insolently unconscious of their power. This twentysomething resolved to savor this place and time. It won't be coming my way again.

Lorraine A. Lezama's column appears on alternate Tuesdays.