'One Generation Blows Bubbles'

“One generation blows bubbles,” writes William Cowper on this date, Sept. 29, in 1783, “and the next breaks them.” Bubbles are insubstantial and made to be broken. Cowper means ideas, the convenient myths we live by and sometimes die by, as though they were eternal. The notion of a generation as a sort of enlightened vanguard gained popularity when I was young. We Baby Boomers are a self-righteous bunch, taking credit for everything from civil rights for blacks to ponytails for men. Our only consolation is that our successors learned from us and have done no better. In his subsequent sentences, Cowper means by philosopher something like “a learned person, a scholar (obsolete),” as the OED puts it. He continues, presciently:
“But in the meantime your philosopher is a happy man. He escapes a thousand inquietudes to which the indolent are subject, and finds his occupation, whether it be the pursuit of a butterfly or a demonstration, the wholesomest exercise in the world.”

So far, so good. He might be describing any contemplative. Then he writes:

“As he proceeds, he applauds himself. His discoveries, though eventually perhaps they prove but dreams, are to him realities. The world gaze at him as he does at new phenomena in the heavens, and perhaps understand him as little. But this does not prevent their praises, nor at all disturb him in the enjoyment of that self-complacence, to which his imaginary success entitles him. He wears his honours while he lives, and, if another strips them off when he has been dead a century, it is no great matter; he can then make shift without them.”

For a man who knew his century’s madhouses from the inside, Cowper could be remarkably wise.