Our natures cannot allow any other way (page 81)
The thing about when you are twenty-two is, you are so beautiful. But everyone else is also so beautiful. So it was for Undine.
And you think, wrongly, that you are going to stay so beautiful, if you even give it a thought at all. And the young men, too, that eternal beauty and rashness of twenty-and-two.
Have you been there? Are you there now? Will you get there? Twenty-two is wasted on the twenty-two, ourselves most of all.
Wilhelmina Wang, Emil Hering, the little meer-maid, none of them have learned that lesson yet, none of them even think to learn it or could, for that’s the very nature of knowledge and time, one is always behind the other, never able to catch up.
The ancient Greeks knew this, the ancient Cathayans knew this, all the ancient mythologies show rueful knowledge of this. But that is why they are the ancients. They have bought knowledge with their age.
But that is neither here nor there, because were the young given the knowledge of the aged, the young would not be young anymore in deed or in thought, and that blooming rashness, that passionate intensity, that love-or-all-else that drives the soul and the limb would cower, hesitate, and doubt. And what is youth then? What is life then? So we go on, each generation making the same mistakes, regretting the same irretrievably devastating wrong-turns, therein propelled forward on that knife-balance between foolishness and successful derring-do. We buy our maturity at the cost of life-defining mistakes, because our natures cannot allow any other way.