My Year With Proust - Day 154

  "'Monsieur,' he said stepping back a pace, and with a glacial air, 'you are still young; you should profit by your youth to learn two things: first, to refrain from expressing sentiments that are too natural not to be taken for granted; and secondly not to rush into speech in reply to things that are said to you before you have penetrated their meaning."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 823

Here are some words of advice that M. de Charlus delivered to Proust.  As words of advice go this isn't too bad.  Naturally I'd prefer the admonition of my grandfather Jum, the Hoosier philosopher, who told me, "If you're going to run with the big dogs you have to be able to pee in the high weeds."  In some ways this is just classic Hoosier folklore, but I have oddly tried to live my life by this approach.  Essentially, if you're going to be taken seriously as a big dog then you have to be able to do what the big dogs do.  So, if you're not good enough then find a way to get good enough.  I've had too many colleagues over the years who complained that people didn't take them seriously enough.  OK, then do something that would warrant you being taken more seriously.  Of course, my grandfather also famously said that women were like street cars, if you miss out on one go to any street corner and they'll be another one along in about five minutes.  I used to think this was bad advice, but streetcars are coming back . . .

Now, getting back to Proust, the relative merits of the advice from M. de Charlus are not helped by the fact that he then followed it up with, "You make me realise that I was premature in speaking to you last night of the charm of youth.  I should have done you a greater service had I pointed out to you its thoughtlessness, its inconsequence, its want of comprehension."  This is the inevitable snarky side of advice from the old to the young, and I guess it's to be expected.  Partially it's just context.  Someone much younger, either a girlfriend or a newly minded Ph.D. colleague will get revved up about something and your initial thought is, "why do you care about that?"  You have enough years of experience that you've seen earlier avatars of the same situation come and go and you know it's really not that important.  However, you also have to be honest enough to admit to yourself, "yeah, at thirty-one I would have been just as pissed off about this issue."  Experience doesn't mean anything if you don't turn the lens on yourself.  Truthfully, and sadly, the reason why there is often a dismissive side to the advice from the older generation to the younger generation is that we envy and fear their passion and their potential.  It's not as if our time in Middle Earth is at an end, but we're not going to bring about a revolution, and our younger colleagues might just do that.  What I try and tell myself, and obviously not always successfully, is that one of my jobs is to help them bring about that revolution.  I have to help them make me obsolete, which kind of sucks, but is the way of the world.

Now, that sounds good, and in many ways I believe it to be true, but does that mean that I like it and that I will go quietly into that good night?  Hardly.  There's a reason why I chose Buddy Guy's Done Got Old for this week's Discography discussion.  I've often joked that when I'm no longer the scariest guy in the room I don't want to be in the room any more.  By this I don't mean scary in a physically threatening way, but I just have to be that guy who, to paraphrase Ric Flair, is just "the man," the one you have to take into account, the one you will have to measure yourself by.  There is a point in your career when the most use you can be is to help shape the development of junior faculty, and that is truthfully one of my goals, but it is not easy.  As is well-documented, I will not age gracefully.