The tiresome thing about getting older is that you hear and read the same things over again. Stuff you know already is given out as news. The young discover global capitalism, sexual freedom, social restraints, and the old discover that they are bored, opening newspapers to read articles they read thirty years ago, listening to revelations that were new to them decades past. And on and on. So we turn on ourselves, like our parents' generation did and mutter about the banality of movies, TV programs, magazines. We begin to decide that these things aren't made for us, and instead of trying to find a way to engage with and exchange ideas outside our own generation, we start to write memoirs like retired generals from some long forgotten war, or decide that it's just as well we're old because the world had failed to understand what we have done for it and it is no longer good enough for us.
The London
Review of Books,
6 July 2000