How old are you? The more thought you bring to bear on the question, the harder it is to answer.
He is the author of Forests , The Dominion of the Dead , and Gardens , all published by the University of Chicago Press..
About the Author: Robert Pogue Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian literature and chair of graduate studies in Italian at Stanford University.
No reader who has wondered at our culture\'s obsession with youth should miss it. "While genius liberates the novelties of the future," Harrison writes, "wisdom inherits the legacies of the past, renewing them in the process of handing them down." A heady, deeply learned excursion, rich with ideas and insights, Juvenescence could only have been written by Robert Pogue Harrison.
At the same time, however, youth--which Harrison sees as more protracted than ever--is a luxury that requires the stability and wisdom of our elders and the institutions.
Drawing on the scientific concept of neotony, or the retention of juvenile characteristics through adulthood, and extending it into the Cultural realm, Harrison argues that youth is essential for culture\'s innovative drive and flashes of genius.
Like all of Robert Pogue Harrison\'s books, Juvenescence ranges brilliantly across cultures and history, tracing the ways that the spirits of youth and age have inflected each other from antiquity to the present.
We live, he says, in an age of juvenescence.
Looked at through that lens, many aspects of late modernity would suggest that we are older than ever, but Robert Pogue Harrison argues that we are also getting startlingly younger--in looks, mentality, and behavior.
And we age within the larger framework of a culture, in the midst of a History that predates us and will outlast us.
For we age simultaneously in different ways: biologically, psychologically, socially.
How old are you? The more thought you bring to bear on the question, the harder it is to answer
