Juvenescence Quotes

“The 'violent wrenching' of the world into constant movements has remained constant. Indeed, the only constancy of the past several decades has been change itself, that is, constant inconstancy. The paradox of this syndrome causes those who suffer from it to hope that change - or the right kind of change - will eventually put an end to the dread it induces through its endless turnover of the new. This is strange hope to hold to, yet it may be the only one available at a time when the unworlding of the world seems a fait accompli.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

“No one today can credibly claim to know how the future will turn out. I have been told that while all frogs begin their lives as tadpoles, not all tadpoles become frogs. It seems that in certain artificially controlled environments - and who will deny that our environments are increasingly artificial - some will remain tadpoles their entire lives. At this point in our cultural history we are becoming like the tadpoles of a new kind of humanity. It remains to be seen of one day we will become frogs.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

“We do not promote the cause of youth when we infantilize rather than educate desire, and then capitalize on its bad infinity; nor when we shatter the relative stability of the world, on which cultural identity depends; nor when we oblige the young to inhabit a present without historical depth or density. The greatest blessing a society can confer on its young is to turn them into the heirs, rather than the orphans, of history. It is also the greatest blessing a society can confer on itself, for heirs rejuvenate the heritage by creatively renewing its legacies. Orphans, by contrast, relate to the past as an alien, unapproachable continent - if they relate to it at all. Our age seems intent on turning the world as a whole into an orphanage, for reasons that no one - least of all the author of this book - truly understands.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

“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.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age