…is the ineffable anticipation of the young: the restlessness, the aliveness, the curiosity and sense of things waiting to be done, dreams to be chased, stories to be lived, an unknowable future, weightlessness.
And the sad thing is, I don’t miss it in myself so much as in the “age-appropriate” people I meet as potential companions. They live in a world of “done,” their future past. Their stories have been lived. There are no more stories to be made with them.
It makes me feel alone.
All of those who take life seriously enough to spend time thinking it through will inevitably find themselves alienated from the larger culture and its values, and it has been that way for a very long time. In Plato’s early dialogs it is clear to any perceptive reader that Socrates is profoundly alienated from Athenian society and that interrogations of fellow citizens are an acid critique of the unexamined assumptions prevalent in the city. Now as then, the only remedy is to associate with those who take life as seriously as you — if you can find any.
That’s a mighty big “if…”