When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 1 Corinthians, 13:11
OTOH, it's fun to play with an AI and see what it comes up with based on a series of requests. A learning process for both man and machine and enjoyable in and of itself. Those of us who are unrepentantly tech geeks will express ourselves using the tools available to us. Also, this is Substack, not The New Yorker—hiring an illustrator is hardly the thing.
Ah, but we all know Mr. Fry has been a fearless and - dare I say childlike - early adopter of technology. For that reason, it tracks, as the youthful say these days.
Promise I won't be using Ai regularly ... just a silly (and indeed childish) addition for this piece. Incidentally, as a favour to Messrs Capone, Hirschfeld, Pacino et al (ho ho) I think we should all start rendering Artificial Intelligence as Ai not Al. It would help with clarity when using a sans serif font (such as this one).
I agree, however I am not sure whether the illustrations were there as an experiment, or to intentionally underscore how frightful and low quality the results of instant gratification can be.
"But can you have the pleasures of childhood without the innocence?" made me immediately think of a beautifully sad 'coming-of-age' song, the title fits so perfectly into your essay, "Sugar Mountain", by the greatest living American songwriter (okay, he's Canadian), Neil Young. "You can't be twenty, on Sugar Mountain, though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon." It's said that America's second greatest songwriter, Joni Mitchell (okay, she's Canadian too!) wrote The Circle Game to make her friend Neil feel better.
Best candy store I've ever been to is Economy Candy at 108 Rivington Street in Manhattan. If anyone finds themselves on the Lower East Side and appreciates the virtue of an old fashioned store, check it out.
I now know that paraleptic is another way of saying preterition!
Aren't they amazing! Every time I see people wearing them I am green with envy at the chutzpah of it.
They look so warm and cozy wrapped in their dismissal of society's conventions.
I genuinely wish I lived in a world where I could walk round in a massive sleeping bag coat, but I don't. I mean, I do, but seeing as it is beyond me I don't, not really.
I have a fantasy about buying one of those enormous yellow ultra-warm North Face snowsuits and spending my retirement wandering around the forest living the life of a bear. Do you think those things are warm enough to sleep in?
In my head (when I'm not really thinking about it) I'm about 20-going-on-12 years old. It's only when I pass one of those ghastly mirror things that I see some grisly old bloke looking back at me.
Thank you for sharing this, Stephen. Another excellent read.
This is all very familiar to someone of a similar vintage. I remember those confectionaries most vividly as part of a Saturday afternoon in North Devon which is where I spent most of my life as a boarder. It was a nice detour into what seems like a parallel journey to my own - which I say having read your autobiographical books. I too am concerned about infantilisation and delayed adulthood because it is an indulgence ill-afforded.
Touching on the themes you briefly mention at the end, if we are to deal with pollution and the deployment of resources, we need to recognise that it will require engineering, technology and ingenuity rather than childish outrage. We can blame ourselves for 'not taking responsibility' but the antidote to that cannot be taking less in the future. In any case, despite it being fashionable to self-flagellate, the notion that certain generations are uniquely culpable is just wrong.
Could it be for example, that this crossroads, is where human progress inevitably leads? Of course there are two roads and three choices. One road goes to on to find solutions and the other to is to deny solutions are needed, holding to the familiar into oblivion. The last choice it to sit down and protest that our feet hurt which is the same as doing nothing.
I am in danger of becoming a reactionary old fool, probably, but I'll cling to yesteryear given the present, in which absurdities and blatant wrongs are accepted as perfectly normal. ( And don't you dare criticise, complain or point out the idiocy of it all or you'll be cancelled at best, or arrested for hate speech as a matter of course.)
Of course the past wasn't a golden age; it's been described as 'a different country', after all, and it was.
We've had to fight hard for wrongs to be righted, for equality, for a fairer world, for acceptance and tolerance, and rightly so. That's social progress.
That tends to happen anyway. We don't send children up chimneys or down mines any more, because we are enlightened and have learned lessons from history.
In the last decade, the one in which you can be insulted by anything and your feelings, however ridiculous, have to be understood, we have seen society change so much that it's become almost dystopian, with a touch of totalitarian around the edges.
'Don't think, do or say that' is our way of life and we are either too scared or too apathetic to counter that tyranny. Heaven forbid we humans accept this cultural programming. The advent of AI is to my mind both incredible, amazing but terrifyingly sinister too.
I note you refer to Marvel comics and Reeses peanut butter cup thingies, dear Stephen. I appreciate you have to write for an American audience too, but my in my youth in England didn't have these things. Perhaps there was a market for them in your part of the UK in the 60s and 70s? In the English Midlands it was the Beano, Dandy, Bunty and Jackie, and Shoot if you wanted a footy fix and yes, loose sweets or tubes of Smarties or Opal Fruits.
I am going to carry on being a nostalgic old fart. I'll count my blessings and progress, in that I was of a generation in which women went on to further education and had careers. Great opportunities. For my mother this was a strange thing, unheard of.
Nostalgia is both a good and bad thing. Lots was better...and I can't think of much that was worse really. I suppose the outside loo and crispy toilet paper will never make a comeback, but how the Victorians and many Edwardians would have envied our Izal and sanitation systems.
We must guard against lots of 'progress' though, I think.. In the last decade there have been changes which might not benefit society as a whole, which might impinge on the freedoms we have known. We need to defend free speech if we do nothing else.
I'll enjoy the present, but I know I'll continue to enjoy childish delights, and at times, childish behaviour. I think older people have a duty to embarrass their children occasionally. In my head I'm still about 30. Long may it last.
I'm writing about John cheever and his post war stories on my substack (feel free to subscribe. That's my plug) and an image that came to mind was George Costanza on Seinfeld excited to sleep with a married woman because "I'm having an affair. That's so adult". Because baby boomers could get divorced without censure while cheevers generation just stayed married.
Also I think a definition of a classic is not just something that stays relevant over time but also over a lifetime. As much as I love willy Wonka and Dr who and still love those things (only hopeful about the new season because rtd did its a sin and definitely has grown since hus first run) I find things in them to love as an adult now. There are many childhood things that I set aside including garbage like Piers Anthony.
Just in case, anyone is curious about John Cheever (who was actually a really good writer and should not be lumped in with white guy writers of the mid-20th century), here's this https://marlowe1.substack.com/p/the-pot-of-gold-the-stories-of-john (although this is not his best story that I'm writing on. He got weirder in the 60s)
Amazing reflection, Stephen! As I was reading your article I was thinking of how many times I've had similar thoughts and yet they never come out half as beautiful and elegant as this. You touch on many important aspects that probably escape most people. I'm glad I found you here!
Perhaps, we are domesticating ourselves. I've heard somewhere that foxes that have been bred to tolerate humans show a tendency to be more like a pup than an adult. Other physical characteristics as well, such as floppy ears but that might just be me mis-remembering.
But if you think about a dog, I'm not sure that my adult dog acts any different than he would as a puppy and I've had the thought that it would be a much nicer world if we played as part of our work like a dog does.
I had a wonderful time reading this piece thank you.
I read last year - I can’t remember where, so apologies to the author - that even if we had a happy childhood there is a transition process that we skip in this culture moving into adulthood and this causes lots of us to get stuck feeling hard done by that there’s no one to take care of our ever-growing list of problems anymore. There’s less pride in becoming an adult. So it makes sense childhood treats allow us to pretend for a while that we’ve regressed and the problems have slipped away too. And, if there was no happy childhood, we treat ourselves to one via these indulgences.
I just like the idea that I can have a PopTart when I want one. I learned, well after childhood, that my brothers hid them and ate them without me knowing it, leaving me to think our Ma never splashed out for them. It’s why they always rushed to bring the groceries in for her.
100% my favourite thing as an adult is being able to eat whatever I want, whenever I want. I'm probably lucky that I apparently have an adult living inside me that ensures I eat my vegetables, too, but it's great to sometimes just have cake for dinner. Or breakfast.
And that sounds ilke exactly the kind of things my brothers did! Except I think that might be the reason my mum rarely bought things like that whilst they were living at home. :-D
I recall Carl Jung also pointing out that we eventually must reject childhood, and accept the narrowing and conditional process of apprenticing to a trade. If you are successful, then later, once a professional and successful trades-person, whatever that trade might be, you return to some of the potential similar to what you had in childhood.
If this process is not accomplished, however, growth into adulthood is laden with cynicism, and if most adults in the next generation do not express this success as well as
The childlike joy and potential while also being successful, it appears there is not much to look forward to.
This is fasscinating. I studied Jung at university but don't remember this. Thanks for sharing. It definitely has a ring of truth to it. I feel like I am living that joy of childhood again now, but I do have a "job" that is very much the dream of mnay children! :-)
I feel I have always looked up to certain persons in this way, as having retained their childlike joys and interests, having manifested their part to play in a world which needs everyone’s best.
I sort of think of you this way, if I’m being candid.
Of all the “celebrity” writers on Substack, you understand this platform better than most. Excellent writing!
He tends to understand writing in nearly any medium better than most, if I may be so bold.
My goodness, that anecdote about the Queen Mother and the television remote control had me laughing in the middle of a meeting. 😂
I wasn’t in a meeting, but I laughed through tears and could not continue reading until I had regained composure.
I needed that. It was worth thousands in healthcare.
A good laugh is one of the most valuable things you can share.
Rubbish AI illustrations bring the whole piece down. Generic and unnecessary.
I also wish he'd refrain from using AI. I know he wants something specific but even so he might be able to find an illustrator to work for him.
OTOH, it's fun to play with an AI and see what it comes up with based on a series of requests. A learning process for both man and machine and enjoyable in and of itself. Those of us who are unrepentantly tech geeks will express ourselves using the tools available to us. Also, this is Substack, not The New Yorker—hiring an illustrator is hardly the thing.
I tried it myself once for my blog--for that kind of purpose, I really don't see the problem. I'd never use AI for, say, a book cover, though.
Stephen could. Also there are public domain images that don't suck. And aren't a problem in terms of stealing from artists.
Ah, but we all know Mr. Fry has been a fearless and - dare I say childlike - early adopter of technology. For that reason, it tracks, as the youthful say these days.
Promise I won't be using Ai regularly ... just a silly (and indeed childish) addition for this piece. Incidentally, as a favour to Messrs Capone, Hirschfeld, Pacino et al (ho ho) I think we should all start rendering Artificial Intelligence as Ai not Al. It would help with clarity when using a sans serif font (such as this one).
Agreed here. Quite a jarring slap in the face to encounter obvious AI illustrations halfway through a piece with this tone.
Always fun playing count-the-fingers in this growing dystopia.
Hmm 🧐
Interesting.
To each his own.
By the way, I would like to point out that you just described something Mr. Stephen Fry wrote as Rubbish.
🙄
To Mr. Fry's point above, I remember being this self-important, but I seem to recall having that slowly worked out of me around middle school.
Mr. Fry’s writing is wonderful as usual, it’s the AI-generated illustrations which are absolutely generic and unnecessary.
I agree, however I am not sure whether the illustrations were there as an experiment, or to intentionally underscore how frightful and low quality the results of instant gratification can be.
I can appreciate your taste preference.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this sentiment! I think it works.
"But can you have the pleasures of childhood without the innocence?" made me immediately think of a beautifully sad 'coming-of-age' song, the title fits so perfectly into your essay, "Sugar Mountain", by the greatest living American songwriter (okay, he's Canadian), Neil Young. "You can't be twenty, on Sugar Mountain, though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon." It's said that America's second greatest songwriter, Joni Mitchell (okay, she's Canadian too!) wrote The Circle Game to make her friend Neil feel better.
Thanks for this essay.
Best candy store I've ever been to is Economy Candy at 108 Rivington Street in Manhattan. If anyone finds themselves on the Lower East Side and appreciates the virtue of an old fashioned store, check it out.
I now know that paraleptic is another way of saying preterition!
Candy is another name for "Poison Your Kids"
Re: enormous puffy jackets.
Aren't they amazing! Every time I see people wearing them I am green with envy at the chutzpah of it.
They look so warm and cozy wrapped in their dismissal of society's conventions.
I genuinely wish I lived in a world where I could walk round in a massive sleeping bag coat, but I don't. I mean, I do, but seeing as it is beyond me I don't, not really.
What a wonderful, tragic world.
I have a fantasy about buying one of those enormous yellow ultra-warm North Face snowsuits and spending my retirement wandering around the forest living the life of a bear. Do you think those things are warm enough to sleep in?
Yup, and I do when winter camping out
too warm if anything :)
I called them sleeping bag coats for years and I am 39. Not for me, but a big parka, yes!
Interesting comments re: the illustrations. I think they work and are wickedly funny. Good story. Thanks.
In my head (when I'm not really thinking about it) I'm about 20-going-on-12 years old. It's only when I pass one of those ghastly mirror things that I see some grisly old bloke looking back at me.
Thank you for sharing this, Stephen. Another excellent read.
We need the escapism of “childishness” more and more frequently due to the overwhelming helplessness we feel in the “adult” sectors of life.
This is all very familiar to someone of a similar vintage. I remember those confectionaries most vividly as part of a Saturday afternoon in North Devon which is where I spent most of my life as a boarder. It was a nice detour into what seems like a parallel journey to my own - which I say having read your autobiographical books. I too am concerned about infantilisation and delayed adulthood because it is an indulgence ill-afforded.
Touching on the themes you briefly mention at the end, if we are to deal with pollution and the deployment of resources, we need to recognise that it will require engineering, technology and ingenuity rather than childish outrage. We can blame ourselves for 'not taking responsibility' but the antidote to that cannot be taking less in the future. In any case, despite it being fashionable to self-flagellate, the notion that certain generations are uniquely culpable is just wrong.
Could it be for example, that this crossroads, is where human progress inevitably leads? Of course there are two roads and three choices. One road goes to on to find solutions and the other to is to deny solutions are needed, holding to the familiar into oblivion. The last choice it to sit down and protest that our feet hurt which is the same as doing nothing.
Made me think.
I am in danger of becoming a reactionary old fool, probably, but I'll cling to yesteryear given the present, in which absurdities and blatant wrongs are accepted as perfectly normal. ( And don't you dare criticise, complain or point out the idiocy of it all or you'll be cancelled at best, or arrested for hate speech as a matter of course.)
Of course the past wasn't a golden age; it's been described as 'a different country', after all, and it was.
We've had to fight hard for wrongs to be righted, for equality, for a fairer world, for acceptance and tolerance, and rightly so. That's social progress.
That tends to happen anyway. We don't send children up chimneys or down mines any more, because we are enlightened and have learned lessons from history.
In the last decade, the one in which you can be insulted by anything and your feelings, however ridiculous, have to be understood, we have seen society change so much that it's become almost dystopian, with a touch of totalitarian around the edges.
'Don't think, do or say that' is our way of life and we are either too scared or too apathetic to counter that tyranny. Heaven forbid we humans accept this cultural programming. The advent of AI is to my mind both incredible, amazing but terrifyingly sinister too.
I note you refer to Marvel comics and Reeses peanut butter cup thingies, dear Stephen. I appreciate you have to write for an American audience too, but my in my youth in England didn't have these things. Perhaps there was a market for them in your part of the UK in the 60s and 70s? In the English Midlands it was the Beano, Dandy, Bunty and Jackie, and Shoot if you wanted a footy fix and yes, loose sweets or tubes of Smarties or Opal Fruits.
I am going to carry on being a nostalgic old fart. I'll count my blessings and progress, in that I was of a generation in which women went on to further education and had careers. Great opportunities. For my mother this was a strange thing, unheard of.
Nostalgia is both a good and bad thing. Lots was better...and I can't think of much that was worse really. I suppose the outside loo and crispy toilet paper will never make a comeback, but how the Victorians and many Edwardians would have envied our Izal and sanitation systems.
We must guard against lots of 'progress' though, I think.. In the last decade there have been changes which might not benefit society as a whole, which might impinge on the freedoms we have known. We need to defend free speech if we do nothing else.
I'll enjoy the present, but I know I'll continue to enjoy childish delights, and at times, childish behaviour. I think older people have a duty to embarrass their children occasionally. In my head I'm still about 30. Long may it last.
I'm writing about John cheever and his post war stories on my substack (feel free to subscribe. That's my plug) and an image that came to mind was George Costanza on Seinfeld excited to sleep with a married woman because "I'm having an affair. That's so adult". Because baby boomers could get divorced without censure while cheevers generation just stayed married.
Also I think a definition of a classic is not just something that stays relevant over time but also over a lifetime. As much as I love willy Wonka and Dr who and still love those things (only hopeful about the new season because rtd did its a sin and definitely has grown since hus first run) I find things in them to love as an adult now. There are many childhood things that I set aside including garbage like Piers Anthony.
Just in case, anyone is curious about John Cheever (who was actually a really good writer and should not be lumped in with white guy writers of the mid-20th century), here's this https://marlowe1.substack.com/p/the-pot-of-gold-the-stories-of-john (although this is not his best story that I'm writing on. He got weirder in the 60s)
Amazing reflection, Stephen! As I was reading your article I was thinking of how many times I've had similar thoughts and yet they never come out half as beautiful and elegant as this. You touch on many important aspects that probably escape most people. I'm glad I found you here!
Perhaps, we are domesticating ourselves. I've heard somewhere that foxes that have been bred to tolerate humans show a tendency to be more like a pup than an adult. Other physical characteristics as well, such as floppy ears but that might just be me mis-remembering.
But if you think about a dog, I'm not sure that my adult dog acts any different than he would as a puppy and I've had the thought that it would be a much nicer world if we played as part of our work like a dog does.
I had a wonderful time reading this piece thank you.
I read last year - I can’t remember where, so apologies to the author - that even if we had a happy childhood there is a transition process that we skip in this culture moving into adulthood and this causes lots of us to get stuck feeling hard done by that there’s no one to take care of our ever-growing list of problems anymore. There’s less pride in becoming an adult. So it makes sense childhood treats allow us to pretend for a while that we’ve regressed and the problems have slipped away too. And, if there was no happy childhood, we treat ourselves to one via these indulgences.
I just like the idea that I can have a PopTart when I want one. I learned, well after childhood, that my brothers hid them and ate them without me knowing it, leaving me to think our Ma never splashed out for them. It’s why they always rushed to bring the groceries in for her.
100% my favourite thing as an adult is being able to eat whatever I want, whenever I want. I'm probably lucky that I apparently have an adult living inside me that ensures I eat my vegetables, too, but it's great to sometimes just have cake for dinner. Or breakfast.
And that sounds ilke exactly the kind of things my brothers did! Except I think that might be the reason my mum rarely bought things like that whilst they were living at home. :-D
I love that point. Well said.
I recall Carl Jung also pointing out that we eventually must reject childhood, and accept the narrowing and conditional process of apprenticing to a trade. If you are successful, then later, once a professional and successful trades-person, whatever that trade might be, you return to some of the potential similar to what you had in childhood.
If this process is not accomplished, however, growth into adulthood is laden with cynicism, and if most adults in the next generation do not express this success as well as
The childlike joy and potential while also being successful, it appears there is not much to look forward to.
This is fasscinating. I studied Jung at university but don't remember this. Thanks for sharing. It definitely has a ring of truth to it. I feel like I am living that joy of childhood again now, but I do have a "job" that is very much the dream of mnay children! :-)
Yes. I think the only rite of passage now may be the driving test for getting a driver's license.
Which many don’t do…
I feel I have always looked up to certain persons in this way, as having retained their childlike joys and interests, having manifested their part to play in a world which needs everyone’s best.
I sort of think of you this way, if I’m being candid.
Thank you.
More of this, please.