"There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive"
About this Quote
West lands the joke with a scalpel, not a wink: the “generation gap” isn’t a natural law, it’s a pair of convenient self-deceptions. By naming two “barriers,” she refuses the usual moral hierarchy where one side is wise and the other reckless. Instead, both camps are caught in a kind of narcissistic time-travel. The middle-aged, she suggests, don’t simply forget what youth felt like; they forget they’ve stopped being its protagonist. That’s a pointed jab at the adult habit of narrating the present as if it were still an extension of their own coming-of-age story, with younger people cast as supporting characters who should follow the script.
Her second barrier twists the knife: young people aren’t merely “inexperienced,” they’re “ignorant” of something almost comically obvious - that the middle-aged are “still alive.” The phrasing is deliberately blunt, mocking how youth culture can treat adulthood as a kind of social death: boring, irrelevant, already filed away. “Still alive” carries the subtext that older people still desire, change, hurt, and dream; they haven’t been embalmed into lessons.
Context matters: West, writing across decades when American life was reorganized by mass media, suburban domesticity, and later the youthquake of the 1960s, understood how quickly age becomes identity politics. The quote’s intent is less to scold than to puncture fantasy. Communication fails not because generations speak different languages, but because each side refuses to grant the other a fully inhabited present tense.
Her second barrier twists the knife: young people aren’t merely “inexperienced,” they’re “ignorant” of something almost comically obvious - that the middle-aged are “still alive.” The phrasing is deliberately blunt, mocking how youth culture can treat adulthood as a kind of social death: boring, irrelevant, already filed away. “Still alive” carries the subtext that older people still desire, change, hurt, and dream; they haven’t been embalmed into lessons.
Context matters: West, writing across decades when American life was reorganized by mass media, suburban domesticity, and later the youthquake of the 1960s, understood how quickly age becomes identity politics. The quote’s intent is less to scold than to puncture fantasy. Communication fails not because generations speak different languages, but because each side refuses to grant the other a fully inhabited present tense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
|---|
More Quotes by Jessamyn
Add to List
