'All the Bluster and Conceit'

My youngest son – he turns eighteen next month -- is a devotee of podcasts. When he was home over the holidays he listened to them while preparing meals and I would overhear them. He recommended several to me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the medium. People have been talking for millennia. But to my ears the speakers, regardless of age, sounded adolescent, whether cloying, preachy, boastful, portentous or cute. They seemed to take little pleasure in language. Conversation is something of an art and these people, the ones I overheard, had no gift for it. Some mistook an emphatic tone or turned-up volume for articulation. Some of what I heard embarrassed me, if not the speaker. How you talk at home or among friends, privately, is your business. Why chatter so tediously in public? 

The other day a reader sent me a link to a podcast he listens to regularly. The guest was a writer whose name I knew but whose work I have never read. He’s about my age and proudly identified himself as a Boomer. His silliness and lack of dignity, his use of age-inappropriate slang, his desperation to be hip, left me embarrassed and bored. Clearly, his desire was to sound wise thanks to his advanced years. I couldn’t listen to the whole thing but it reminded me of a poem by Dick Davis, who is seventy-five. “Admonition for the Seventh Decade” was published in First Things and collected in Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2017):

 

“All the bluster and conceit,

All the hare-brained indiscreet

Obfuscations and obsessions,

All the ludicrous confessions,

Put them by now, put them by,

Clean them out before you die.

 

“Even though you can’t undo

All the mess that makes up you,

Find a modicum of quiet;

Quash the long uncivil riot

That goes on inside your heart;

Clear the drunks out, make a start.”