It Gets Better, Better than Before

-->

Wendy Lustbader's book, Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older, is one of those books that I wish I owned when I was young and was going through those horrible years when the angel-headed had no place to go and no hope, except for a word here or there from one person or one book.

Here is the first paragraph from the front flap of the dust jacket:

From our earliest years, we are told that youth will be the best time of our lives and everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is often not the golden era it is made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with tension, confusion, and the angst of uncertainty. As we get older, Lustbader asserts, we gain self-knowledge, confidence, and an increasing capacity to be true to ourselves.

U.S. President Obama recently gave an excellent talk on the subject:

That is what I would like to say to every single young person who sees the truth of how insane, upside-down, the world is in which we are living, where the first are last and the last are first, where those who are respected and supposed to know things are not what they seem, and that the stone that was rejected ultimately becomes the headstone of the corner. I would like to write a book like Lustbader's and just say what she and President Obama are saying here, only more so!

William James once wrote “I take it that no man is truly educated who has not dallied with the thought of suicide.”

I think this is why Salinger's “The Catcher in the Rye” has been the most important book in so many people's lives. The protagonist, a young person, Holden Caulfield, sees how screwed up and insane the world is. He's still in it at the end of the book, with work to do before “it gets better,” but if he doesn't get too discouraged or too hurt, he can come out to a place that is not only “better than before,” (one of Cohen's “Old Ideas”) but is magnificent beyond what he ever could have dared to believe. It's a very real "Going home to where it's better than before."

Lustbader says (p. 1), “Everything gets better – you just have to get through your twenties.” I think it's a life-long struggle but the worst of it seems to be, I would agree, when you're young.