Aspiring to Wisdom

At one point in the ’90s, I was visiting Mom’s house while my grandparents were there. Everyone in the family was a reader, though not all of the same things. At the time, Mom subscribed to Vanity Fair. That month’s cover featured a picture of Courtney Love looking very much like Courtney Love. Grandpa noticed the magazine on a table. Mom asked him, smiling, what he thought of Courtney Love. He just shrugged.

As my personal odometer rings up progressively higher numbers, I appreciate that shrug much more. It was a kind of deference. I would guess that the appeal of grunge was lost on him—in the early days of MTV, I remember him referring to teenagers “jitterbugging” as they watched—but rather than muttering something about “kids today,” he simply ceded the territory to them. I don’t remember him ever bashing younger people or the things they cared about. It wasn’t because he tuned out from the world; he had some pretty clear political opinions and could discuss the news right up to the end. He simply accepted that not everything was about him, and he was fine with that.

I thought of Grandpa when I read this letter in The Chronicle. A retired college president berates a respected researcher who had published a piece on dead-end jobs, telling him to stop “whining.” The letter is a remarkably compact expression of an entire worldview. In just a few paragraphs, it combines fake erudition, dismissiveness, factual error, disingenuous self-deprecation, smugness and self-righteousness; it reads like a meaner-spirited version of Sam the Eagle from the Muppets.

It’s very much the opposite of Grandpa.

At CCM, I had the great luck to get to know an English professor, Sara Pfaffenroth, in the last few years of her career. She had been there for decades before I arrived. She was universally respected on campus, which I think stemmed from her utter and honest curiosity. She never stopped wondering about things. After she broke the news of her pending retirement, I asked her what she wanted to do next. She mentioned building an airplane, and she was serious. She had never built one, but thought it looked like a cool project. With time on her hands, she could learn entirely new skills. And she could talk about almost anything. One of my prouder moments there came when she asked what I thought of Britney Spears, and I replied, “Every generation needs its own Debbie Gibson.” Her laugh was worth it.

Even then, I admired that model of getting older. Build experience, learn things, but remain curious and open to what the world has to offer. Passing negative judgment on anything new—William F. Buckley’s famous portrayal of “standing athwart history, yelling Stop!”—seems small and sad. It’s just a miserable way to live.

I’m not arguing that Dr. Pangloss was right and that every day in every way, things get better and better. Loss is real. I’m arguing that, to a meaningful degree, we can decide how to play the hand we are dealt. And that some strategies will result in better hands than others over time.

Before the pandemic scared me away from gyms, I used to go a few times a week. I had some playlists to listen to on the elliptical, but after a while the same old songs were getting stale. I asked The Boy for some recommendations that might stretch my listening a bit. Among other things, he recommended Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. I gave it a try. Underneath the words, I could hear some sophisticated and appealing musical moments, but I just couldn’t get past some of the words. When TB asked what I thought, I responded, “I just can’t. Every time he drops another N-word, I feel gross. I feel like I’m eavesdropping on somebody else’s conversation.” At the time, I was almost apologetic. In retrospect, though, it was my wordier version of Grandpa’s shrug. I wasn’t going to pass judgment on Kendrick Lamar; I didn’t feel entitled to. I just recognized that I wasn’t his target audience, and that was fine. The world is big enough for multiple styles, including those I don’t personally get. I didn’t need to bash TB’s taste, and he certainly didn’t deserve to have it bashed.

Experience can make you jaded, or it can make you wise. Based on the older people I’ve admired, wisdom looks like a combination of experience, intelligence, curiosity and discretion. Intelligence and curiosity can happen at any age, but discretion is learned and experience takes time. Wisdom is, in many ways, a choice. We can use what we’ve learned over time to help other people and to appreciate things in new ways, or we can shake our fists and yell at exploited young people to stop whining and start applying for jobs like it’s 1969. I don’t have the wisdom of Grandpa or Prof. Pfaffenroth, but I’d much rather follow their model than the other.