‘Holden Caulfield at 27’: Esquire’s 1968 Profile of Peter Fonda
Apparently prompted by the recent death of Peter Fonda, Esquire reprints its 1968 in-depth profile of the actor.
I consider myself part of the universe. The universe is a religion. Man is a religion. It’s all heaven, it’s all hell. Everything is everything. Death is just a change.”
The Misconception about Baby Boomers and the Sixties
Louis Menand declares in The New Yorker:
Thankfully, we are within sight of the end of the fiftieth anniversaries of things that happened in the nineteen-sixties. What’s left is mostly stuff that no one wants to remember . . . One reason to feel glad to be nearly done with this round of fiftieths is that we will no longer be subjected, constantly, to generalizations about the baby-boom generation. There are many canards about that generation, but the most persistent is that the boomers were central to the social and cultural events of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from being alive, baby boomers had almost nothing to do with the nineteen-sixties.
For his argument, he defines baby boomers as those born between July 1946 and December 1964; approximately 76 million people were born during those 18 years, he says, and the “expectations and potential life paths of Americans born in 1946 were completely different from the expectations and life paths of Americans born in 1964.”
Menand’s point is that baby boomers were consumers of significant social and cultural changes that were created by older people born before July 1946.
The idea that youth culture is culture created by youth is a myth. Youth culture is manufactured by people who are no longer young. When you are actually a young person, you can only consume what’s out there. It often becomes “your culture,” but not because you made it.
Our Brains Tell Stories So We Can Live
despite the verities of science, many of our most important questions compel us to tell stories that venture beyond the facts. For all of the sophisticated methodologies in science, we have not moved beyond the story as the primary way that we make sense of our lives.
Robert A. Burton, M.D., a neurologist and novelist, explains how and why our brains construct narratives to make meaning our of our experiences.
‘The Last Ocean’ Considers Dementia in All Its Uncertainty
The first, startling epigraph in Nicci Gerrard’s new book, “The Last Ocean,” comes from Emily Dickinson: “Abyss has no Biographer.” Gerrard sets out to tell the story of dementia, a disease that can appear to consume those it afflicts. After her father, John, died in 2014, the author — who writes best-selling thrillers with her husband under the name Nicci French — embarked on learning more about the disease as both a journalist and an activist. The result is a tender, inquisitive tour of a subject that can be raw and painful.
In an interview with John Williams in The New York Times, Nicci Gerrard talks about her latest book.
“I knew there was a book I could write about how mysterious it is to be human, really.”
“For three or four years, I spent my working days talking to doctors, nurses, carers and, above all, people living with the illness. I knew I had to find a way of making that into a book full of lots of different voices and stories.”
“I didn’t want to write a book that was certain and had answers. I wanted to write a book that was full of questions and feelings.”
“If I had to think of one thing that knocked me back: I became more optimistic and less scared about getting old, becoming frail, than I had been before I started.”
© 2019 by Mary Daniels Brown
Retreading for Retirement 