Chapter 8
VIII.2 The act of concentrating on a given subject is, conversely, the act of temporarily forgetting everything else.
VIII.4 Obedience is the necessary context for education and indeed for survival; moreover, it is the primal matter or substructure of what will later be self-control.
VIII.6 We generally feel that we must choose between coddling and suppressing teenagers, when instead our proper function is to challenge them.
VIII.10 Every teacher, whether he knows it or not, teaches three things at once: the subject under investigation, the art of investigation and the art of teaching.
VIII.14 The mockery of established value and the rebellion against it are essential experiences of youth. In this high form of play, we learn our weaknesses through initiatives of omnipotence, our communality through assertions of uniqueness, our loneliness through charades of independence. Good societies make demands on their young, yet allow them freedom for frivolity . . .
VIII.15 The accusation that contemporary society is afflicted with a “cult of youth” is only partly true. What we see today is more a middle-aged usurpation of youth, an attempt by the middle-agers to commandeer, through nostalgia fads, freakish styles, hairblowers, skin-oils and inarticulate slang, the supposedly happy condition of youth.
VIII.16 I and others like me live in a kind of eternal middle age, and no wonder; for no matter where we are in age, we are always in the middle of time, and must weigh our future equally with our past.
VIII.18 It was not until later that I realized that this refusal, this anger, was the real crux of aging: that the pain of growing old lies specifically in the fact that part of us does not grow old.
