| [00:01.49] |
Lesson 5 |
| [00:03.31] |
Youth |
| [00:10.57] |
How does the writer like to treat young people? |
| [00:16.76] |
People are always talking about 'the problem of youth'. |
| [00:21.23] |
If there is one--which I take leave to doubt |
| [00:24.73] |
--then it is older people who create it,not the young themselves. |
| [00:29.87] |
Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings |
| [00:36.39] |
--people just like their elders. |
| [00:38.96] |
There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: |
| [00:43.25] |
the young man has a glorious future before him |
| [00:46.68] |
and the old one has a splendid future behind him:and maybe that is where the rub is. |
| [00:55.19] |
When I was a teenager,I felt that I was just young and uncertain-- |
| [00:59.90] |
that I was a new boy in a huge school, |
| [01:03.34] |
and I would have been very pleased to be regarded |
| [01:05.95] |
as something so interesting as a problem. |
| [01:09.48] |
For one thing,being a problem gives you a certain identity, |
| [01:14.15] |
and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking. |
| [01:19.81] |
I find young people exciting. |
| [01:22.83] |
They have an air of freedom, |
| [01:25.09] |
and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. |
| [01:30.70] |
They are not anxious social climbers,and they have no devotion to material things. |
| [01:37.10] |
All this seems to me to link them with life and the origins of things. |
| [01:42.36] |
It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast with us suburban creatures. |
| [01:52.40] |
All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. |
| [01:56.15] |
He may be conceited,ill-mannered, presumptuous or fatuous, |
| [02:02.55] |
but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders-- |
| [02:08.28] |
as if mere age were a reason for respect. |
| [02:12.00] |
I accept that we are equals,and I will argue with him,as an equal,if I think he is wrong. |