Letter #86: This Side of Paradise
There's Little Comfort for the Wise
Splash.
Did you ever see the movie The Wolf of Wall Street? Only a guilt-ridden ex-Catholic like Martin Scorsese could make a film about wild-man Leonardo DiCaprio getting filthy rich while scarfing drugs and having sex with a stark raving naked Margot Robbie and make you think: Man, that does not look fun at all!
Some of the more comical scenes in the film involve Rob Reiner typecast as a fat old buffoon, namely DiCaprio’s father. Whenever Dad tries to counsel his son to act more responsibly, DiCaprio and his friends have to stifle their mocking laughter. Doesn’t the old man know that the days of restraint and integrity are past? The lads are living the new dream of freedom! And they’ll go on living it until it destroys them completely.
Here is yet one more thing we can blame on technology. When I was a lad, TV commercials were forever telling us that some product or other was “new and improved!” But when we rushed out to buy it, the toothpaste or cereal or soda was always pretty much the same as before. Then one day, I was writing a screenplay on one of these new-fangled floppy disc personal computer gizmos when, right in the middle of a thrilling action scene, the machine started groaning like an old man and ground to a halt.
When I finally went out and bought a computer with a “new and improved” hard drive, I suddenly realized: Aha, from now on, things that are new actually will be improved.
This rapid advance of technology favors the intelligence set of the young. By the time we geezers have learned how to download our grandchildren’s snapshots onto MySpace, the next generation is already blackmailing their ex-girlfriends with deep fake nudes.
As a result, when we Q-tips pipe up with a piece of sound advice like, “Hey, don’t blackmail girls with deep fake nudes,” we seem out of the groove. Rather than become obsolete at 50, there’s every incentive for us to get some plastic surgery, take some pep pills and pretend to be as young as ever until we collapse from a heart attack at age 51.
You’re right, of course: We should have mercy on the foolish choices of foolish youth. But perhaps we can reserve a little blame and disdain for their elders, so desperate to stay relevant they refuse to preach what they’ve neglected to practice.
This is the reason we need old books more than ever. At any given moment, any given culture may be awash in self-destructive idiocy. But over the years, the best of minds have sifted nuggets of wisdom out of the river of time and preserved them on the page. When our elders fail us, as they have failed these latest generations, such books remain, a friend to man, to whom they say: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. So don’t be such a schmuck.”
Love, Dad
Near the end there, I expected you to say we need old books, because you never know when a Kndle will grind to a halt.
You could do 10 reasons old books are better than technology. #1 would have to be: old books smell a heck of a lot better than a Kindle. 🥰
How many of the elite-type Millennials or Z’ers have ever even heard of Keats or his magical words about the Grecian urn? When I dictate, the AI comes up with ‘earn’ and not ‘urn,’ which says it all. Me thinks it will take a cataclysm, which of course nobody wants, to get the education of the young to change, to get the teachers and their pupils to pull those real nuggets of gold out of the river of time, to recapture and ponder the ‘urn’ and not turn it into ‘earn.’