Being Young
Mounted on the wall of the shower in most hotel rooms now are three push-down pump bottles, for wash, shampoo, and conditioner. They tend to be brands you never see in stores, and they often bear aspirational names. I recently saw bottles with an unusual name: WRONG AGAIN. And indeed, I was. Squinting my eyes brought the brand’s real name into better focus. It was YOUNG AGAIN.
I rather liked my mistake, though. For soap and shampoo to be named “Wrong Again” would be charmingly ironic. Maybe the company is run by Calvinists who want to emphasize your unworthiness! “You were born in sin and you can’t get anything right.” Or perhaps the company is formed of reality therapy psychologists: “The truth is, Mr. Hotel Guest, that your shower daydreams are totally unrealistic. You haven’t had a good idea since the man from Hope sat in the White House, and it’s time you faced that fact.”
But the reality is simpler: I was wrong again because this brand is Young Again. Deflecting blame from myself I noted (to myself) that “wrong” and “young” are five-letter words, that they share three letters, and that they both fall towards the end of the dictionary. In all caps, they have similar shapes.
Still, can we take seriously a brand that’s called Young Again? The desire to be young is understandable from a merely physical point of view: the youthful body is more limber and less scarred than what it turns into over time. But the youthful brain lacks the wisdom that comes only over time, with living and thinking about life. Bernard Shaw, I’ve been told (though Mr. Google won’t corroborate), is responsible for the mordant thought: “The problem with youth is that it’s wasted on the young.”
Shaw means that we deceive ourselves if we think we could selectively recapture the vigor of being young without enduring the relative immaturity. Only time can teach us, for instance, what it means to love someone through thick and thin, and that time leaves its marks on our body.
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Most simply of all, what’s with the idea that a soap and shampoo can make us young again? My verdict is that such an idea is, well, wrong again.
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On the other hand, we should not forget the resurrection body. Aquinas thought it would be a human body at its peak, and hence about 30 years old—conveniently, perhaps, the approximate age of Jesus at the time of his death. That body will suffer no decay or loss, and if you want to imagine the Young Again people as being proponents of the resurrection body, go for it! But can a consumer product give us something as good as God plans to give us? The theologian thinks such a claim would be, forgive me, wrong again.
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Good Books & Good Talk: In Dallas, on Sun. Nov. 29 at 5pm, we will have the fourth and final session on The Brothers Karamazov, discussing Book 10 through the Epilogue. The session runs for 90 minutes. Please know that you are welcome even if you missed earlier sessions, and even if you have not yet read the part being discussed. Dostoyevsky is beautiful and deep and rich, wherever and whenever you pick him up.
Those “Spend Life” billboards—a follow-up to my blog five weeks ago. I keep seeing these billboards, even in northern Texas. Recent sightings include “Spend Life Courageously.” “Spend Life Gratefully.” “Spend Life Hopefully” (which gets bonus points for using “hopefully” in its correct sense). “Spend Life Patiently.” One reader wrote that he knows the small Oklahoma bank that sponsors these, and that its owner is indeed interested in helping people use money in godly ways, rather than building bigger barns for storing it.