Youth

Youth

(Milena Jesenska, 23. Nov. 1922,  Narodni Listy)

I don’t know where the idea that youth is the only happy time in life came from and why it is so widely believed. Maybe it is because people forget so easily and the past is always pretty, because on one hand we have the horrors of our uncertain end ahead of us, and on the other hand we have youth which, once lived, is always ours, it increases our inner richness, and man in his misery clings to everything he can call his own, as if without possessions he was more exposed to mortality.

I clearly remember the hour when in the first, real, painful youth, I ceased being young. Nothing weird and nothing special had happened, it was just an evening in the blue-grey dawn at the window of a two storey apartment house, looking at an ordinary, weary, bleak street, and the trams were going right, going left, needlessly rushing and infinitely comical. I was neither happy nor unhappy, I felt ordinarily, normally sad, just like everyone is longing for something in the evenings, and no one will ever unravel what for. However, suddenly I knew - and only later did I grasp the significance of this insight: no matter what happens to me in my whole life to come, no matter what, I will never take my life.

I do not want to talk about suicide. Maybe it is salvation, maybe sin. But one thing is sure: for a young person it is necessary. Not the actual, but the potential suicide that does not leave any backdoors open. Weak people escape to it. Coy ones it seduces. Liars it punishes. Yet to everyone it is necessary. Just remember, remember the unspeakable, panicky, incomprehensible pain you had when you were 16, remember the painful search for an escape, for ground underneath your feet, remember the desperate hitting-your-head-against-the-wall. The inner conflicts, the insane chase after some undefined, undefinable Something, the sleepless nights. Would we have beared this, if we had not had the secret exit: maybe I kill myself?

I know very well that all this has nothing in common with our happy cheerfulness. Sure, we have been cheerful, happy, foolish, crazy, reckless, headless. But we all had the secret of a real, immeasurable misery. It is the misery of a person who does not know why he suffers and for what purpose, who is half embarrassed by his pain, half proud of it, and who solely develops and becomes himself based on this very pain. Everything depends on how deep and sincere a person can process the pain of his youth. This will be his measure stick and treasure for his entire life. For in one’s entire life one will not have anything else, will not acquire anything else, will not get to know anything else. Throughout one’s life one will have experiences. But only in one’s youth one lives through changes in his soul. A human being is only rich once, only productive once: in the pain of his 16 years. In the moment when one’s pain does not seem infinite one somehow halts and lives off one’s memories and savings.

The perceived infiniteness of feelings and sentiments, the power, grotesqueness, exorbitancy of a 16 year old life, tensions of inexperience all disappear the moment a person realizes that everything ends. As soon as I start closing my eyes when I feel pain, as I clench my teeth and convince my heart, with held breath, that the pain will go away, get better, stop and disappear, as soon as I know how I can help myself, as soon as I know that I can ease the pain when I go outside, or that tears will wash it away, or a cut in the finger will numb it, in the moment when a 16 year old is no longer convinced that something is infinite and will last until his death, in this moment, when he starts getting poorer by his experiences -because through experience a person gets poorer, never richer- in this moment he is no longer young.

And only then he can win strength and self control, only then he can smile about the biggest pain. Only then he is a grown up and gets a character that henceforth will not change. It is the time when someone stands before his life and sees that it has shaped itself, without knowing exactly how. He sees a predestined way before him, sees that he has responsibilities and duties, realizes the limits of his possibilities, takes on a job and from time to time will feel in a corner of his heart: now almost nothing will ever change, that is life, inner events will happen, but certainly no inner changes -and I have to live with it. A young man does not live with it. A young man is creative without knowing it. He creates and fights, loves and hates with every day, with every book he reads, he fights back, fights back to his death, searches, runs forward with an imaginary pistol in his pocket and creates the safe path of his life like a blind god. As soon as he sees what he has created he loses two big gifts of life: the gift of desolation in the dark face of death and the gift of subjective endlessness.

The sentence “The youth is happy” is one of the biggest crimes. It misleads us to the worst imprudence. It misleads mothers to smile half benevolently, half ironically, when they find their kids causelessly melancholic and innerly torn. It misleads grown-ups to confuse pain with sorrow, sorrow that always has a real and thus fixable and hence unimportant reason while pain has a cause that is unreal, inexplicable and thus awful, enormous, and overshadowing everything. Persuaded and reassured by this phrase we think a 16 year old boy is happy and don’t know and constantly forget that for whole days, evenings and nights he is in danger of following his unquenchable and painful desire, and that one step is enough to bring his life on a path that he cannot help but follow from then on. We fear too little for our children, blinded by the conviction that not much can happen to them, the young and happy ones, because they will get over it, as we are used to say. However, we are the ones to whom nothing can happen, who are innerly firm and secured, who are while they become.

Therefore the Young never understand the older ones, because they rightfully don’t understand the word “experience”. What experience is it that man acquires! It is just an impoverished awareness, considering the end right from the beginning, an impediment to excitement, and all the things which -probably fortunately for practical life - make people efficient, earnest, cautious, miserly, and frugal. A man is never parting from his youth; in his youth he finds friends, later on only acquaintances. Should he meet a person he somehow grew up with and should this person now be very different from him by capability, development, position, and conviction, still there is the warmth of organic understanding, each word has its origin in common understanding, gestures seem familiar, something infinitely intimate and close sounds from the laughter, one simply likes this person and has no reservations against him. The book someone loved in his youth, the music to which he cried in his youth, the streets he liked, a path in the mountains or a clearing in the forest, everything, everything belongs to him as a piece of the world that no one can take away from him and that is wonderful in his memory. When he leaves home he will find respect, admiration, longing, familiarization and maybe love. But the feeling of absolute, pure, broad affection he only has for everything belonging to his youth, no matter if it's pretty or ugly.

And still, everyone who can be completely honest will say to himself: I never want to be 16 again. What miracle helped me survive this time?