'A Father Unto Thy Contemporaries'

I see it in my youngest son and remember it in myself – the demand for autonomy and the other privileges of adulthood, and the inability as yet to transcend who he is: a fairly mature seventeen-year-old. I can’t complain. He’s a good kid. On Friday he started his summer job stocking shelves and running the cash register at Walgreen’s. Compared to the savages lately in the news, including some significantly older than him, he’s a model of maturity.

At seventeen, the year I went away to college, I very much wanted to be a grownup but didn’t always know how to accomplish that. Many of my contemporaries had other ideas. The ages began to blur. Maturity was no longer judged a virtue. Adults wanted to act like children and adolescents. A frequently encountered type today is the childish man, clinging desperately to immaturity. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) seems to have anticipated this stunting of character in Part III, Section 8 of Christian Morals (written 1670s, published 1716):

“Confound not the distinctions of thy Life which Nature hath divided: that is, Youth, Adolescence, Manhood, and old Age, nor in these divided Periods, wherein thou art in a manner Four, conceive thy self but One. Let every division be happy in its proper Virtues . . .”

“Do as a Child but when thou art a Child, and ride not on a Reed at twenty. He who hath not taken leave of the follies of his Youth, and in his maturer state scarce got out of that division, disproportionately divideth his Days, crowds up the latter part of his Life, and leaves too narrow a corner for the Age of Wisdom, and so hath room to be a Man scarce longer than he hath been a Youth . . . anticipate the Virtues of Age, and live long without the infirmities of it . . . so may’st thou be coetaneous unto thy Elders, and a Father unto thy contemporaries.”

Coetaneous: a rare word with a simple meaning, straight from the Latin: “of the same age, equal in age” (OED). A good synonym with the same root is coeval.