Journey of the Generations. Mark Twain said it most pithily. When I was a boy of 14, my father

was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21,

I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. Whether Freud was right

or wrong about the Oedipus complex,

there is surely this much truth to it that the power and pain of

adolescence is that we seek to define ourselves as different,

individuated, somebody other than our parents.

When we were young, they were the sustaining presence in our lives, our security,

our stability, our source of groundedness in the world. The first and deepest terror we have as

very young children is separation anxiety, the absence especially of the mother. Young children

will play happily so long as mother or caregiver is within

sight. Absent that, and there's panic. We're too young to venture into the world on our own.

It's precisely the stable, predictable presence of parents in our early years that give us the basic sense of trust in life. But then comes the time as we approach adulthood when we have to learn to make our own way in the world.

Those are the years of searching and in some cases rebellion.

They're what makes adolescents so fraught.

The Hebrew word for youth, the root nar, has these connotations of

awakening and shaking. We begin to define ourselves by reference to our friends, our peer group,

rather than our family. Often there is tension between the generations. The literary theorist, Harold Bloom, wrote two

fascinating books, the anxiety of influence and maps of misreading, in which in Freudian style,

he argued that strong poets make space for themselves by deliberately misinterpreting or

misunderstanding their predecessors.

Otherwise, if you are really in awe of the great poets that came before you,

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