Aging & Wisdom Quote by John C. Hawkes

There is something gleefully cruel, and formally ambitious, in Hawkes admitting he "took" two young people and "made them very old". The verb choice frames the novelist as a kind of stage magician or sadistic engineer: youth is not a protected category but raw material. It signals an intent less about coming-of-age than about premature erosion, the way violence, poverty, and panic can accelerate the soul into exhaustion long before the body catches up.

In the context of The Lime Twig (1961), Hawkes is writing in the postwar shadow where innocence reads as a luxury item and narrative comfort is suspect. His work belongs to that American strain of literary modernism that distrusts realism’s moral bookkeeping; he’s less interested in explaining why bad things happen than in building a world where badness is the atmosphere. Making characters "very old" becomes a technique: he compresses time, strips away the sentimental pacing of youth, and forces his protagonists to move with the heaviness of people who have already seen the end.

The subtext is also a self-defense against audience expectations. If you come to "two very young people" looking for vitality, romance, the usual plot-based empathy, Hawkes warns you off. He’s after a different kind of intimacy: the closeness you feel when you watch someone’s illusions die in real time. It’s a writer staking his claim that style and pressure, not likability, are the engines of meaning.