Mundane Musings Youth—To-Day and Yesterday

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 172, 11 October 1927, Page 5

Mundane Musings Youth —To-Day and Yesterday

I was sitting on a lawn starred with daisies. Above me the silken sheen of new-born leaves was swaying out the birth-crumples on a soft, heavenly breeze. In front of me, across the valley, on the hill, a shimmer of wild hyacinths threaded its way in blue glades through the pine trees. Here, there, everywhere, a butterfly flitted, certain of but one thing in its errant course; certain but of this, that spring had come, that the world had renewed its youth, that it had renewed it in the old, old way. So the Strength of the Guiding Hand came home to me. The most modern of motor mowers might murder the daisies, leaving the lawn like a board of green cloth; but in a week they would testify to unarrested growth; the bluebells might be trampled down by whole generations of way-faring lovers, but the slow, unerring change of the seasons would bring them back again, slender, meekly bowing, but defiant. And the tender new leaves. . . ? I had got; so far in truism when, discordant absolutely, the jazz rhythm of a gramophone made my whole world pulsate—no! it was too jerky for any pulse save that preceding dissolution! —and a posse of slim boys and girls, none of them apparently more than sixteen. rushed out of the house behind ane, followed by gramophone voices yelling in the accents of America: "Why did I kiss that gurl?" The question came too abruptly. I simply stared at the pretty sight among the daisies. It was difficult to distinguish the boys from the girls. All had short hair, all smoked cigarettes, a faint flavouring of swear-words spiced their chatter, and all had wide, open, low-necked collars. They were simply dear, happy young things with the spring in their blood come out to try if the lawn, duly mown, would on the morrow’s festival, be hard enough and smooth enough for a Charleston! Spring did I say? They were all springs! From hip to knee, from knee to ankle, from ankle to toe, their white, pink, nude, cream legs shivered and vibrated rhythmically. “It will be all right if it doesn’t rain," came a girl’s voice as a couple jerked past: laboriously. The boy’s face was grim, determined! his mind was evidently preoccupied with his feet. “But one cannot —count —on the Clerk of the Weather," came spasmodically. "Can one count on—anything—nowadays?” floated backward as they passed on. I rose and escaped into the house. But the atmosphere followed me.. That atmosphere of syncopated, lightvisaged, disillusioned uncertainty. "Why did I kiss that girl?” "Why didn’t I kiss the other one? Why didn’t. I do something else?—or nothing?" The memory of eight clever ladies who have lately been holding a symposium on the problem of modern youth came to me, and in a flash the word syncopation offered itself as solution. I went to the big dictionary and read: "Syncopation. The object of this is conflict or variance with the regular measure." There you have it. It is no new thing. Youth has always tried to syncopate, and surely, surely it did not need eight clever women to stress the fact that au fond humanity in the 20th century is much the same as it was in the 19th; it cannot be otherwise. To me, a woman past 80, the only difference between the youth of to-day and the youth of yesterdoy is one of degree, not of kind. To-day it wants to syncopate the whole world, and that world is a new one. How new, it is difficult to realise. Even youth itself does not grip how much of its silly effrontery, its idle rebellion, is due to the novelty that surrounds it, the novelty of seeing things that have never been seen before, of hearing I sounds that have never before been ■ heard, of doing what was impossible in ’ the past. Old values have to be : scrapped, new ones adjusted, and im- • mature minds are barely capable of • the task; it needs time and maturity. And, say what you will, the brain of ! either man or woman is, under 25 years • of sige, not mature. L * * • The most salient point of youth to- . day is, to me, its disillusionment, its dispiritedness. It is not sure why it kissed that girl! Briefly, it has lost its arts, it puts the wrong values on things. At this, no one. of sense can wonder; even to us old people the world's future is terribly uncertain. But there are signs of sanity. A lady watching the Charleston the other day said to me, “Poor dears! They are trying to do the impossible—to dance against the beat; but, in a way, they are reaching out to the fourth dimension." So perhaps next, or the next or the next spring, when the daisies star the lawn once more and the wild hyacinths thread the pine woods with shimmering blue, and the young leaves lose their birth-crumples in the springtime breeze, youth may recognise the Strength of the Guiding Hand that upholds all creation, that never, never makes a mistake; that steers its straight unswerving course from youth to age. So—cheerio!