“Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years,” the Quote of the Week in a certain newspaper began. How true, Dr. Boli thought. But then he read the rest of the quotation.

Nobody grows old merely by living a certain number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

—Sam Ullman, American poet and humanitarian.

Dr. Boli is being honest with you when he says that he had not expected the quotation to go that way. After reading the first sentence, he had expected something like this: “Nobody grows old merely by living a certain number of years. We grow old by learning from our experiences, by loving wisdom and nevertheless understanding that we are not yet wise, by sorting through our youthful enthusiasms and honestly discarding the follies among them. Without that labor, we can never be truly old; we can only be wrinkled children.”

But it seems that Dr. Boli, in spite of living in this country since before the Constitution, is not American enough to understand age the American way. He still thinks of age and experience as valuable things to be treasured, whereas the American ideal has it that life ends at twenty-nine. Aging is a catastrophe to be avoided; in fact, the only thing we avoid more zealously than aging is the only alternative to aging.

Well, Dr. Boli feels foolish now. But, to be fair to himself, he will point out that the attribution to an American poet and humanitarian comes after the quotation. The word “American” might have made him think differently. “The youth of America is their oldest tradition,” as one of Oscar Wilde’s characters observed a century and a quarter ago. “It has been going on now for three hundred years.”

And indeed the sentiment of Samuel Ullman is not a new one. It is amusing to reflect that Mr. Ullman was fourteen years older than Oscar Wilde. It is even more amusing to reflect that he was probably not the author of this quotation.

Of course it is all over the Internet attributed to Ullman, but never with a citation, which is an observation that always leads us to suspect a misattributed quotation. “Youth,” from which it is taken, is usually described as a “poem,” which indicates that the people who quote it are so lamentably ignorant of literary history that they believe a man who died in 1924 could have written a prose essay and called it a “poem.”

Yet here is “Youth” quoted at the site of the Samuel Ullman Museum in Alabama. What more authority could you want? Except, perhaps, for a citation with date, which is nowhere to be found.

However, if we go back in time a bit, we find that the little essay—not described as a “poem”—was constantly reprinted in magazines in the early twentieth century. In a 1927 issue of the Michigan Education Journal we find it attributed to that venerable essayist “Anon.” In an elaborately illustrated page from Cosmopolitan in 1914 we find it attributed to Dr. Frank Crane, and that seems to be the earliest and most popular attribution.

In the February 12, 1927, edition of The Foreword, a Masonic journal, we find the essay, and then this explanation of its source:

Fred Harvey gave the preceding meditation on Youth to The Kansas City Star with the comment that it came in a letter from Sam Moore, formerly of Kansas City, now of New York. The Star asked Mr. Moore if he were its author. Mr. Moore said he wished he were, but he got it from George Reichel, Vice-president of the First National Bank. Mr. Reichel, appealed to, said he had it in a letter from E. C. Stuart, Vice-president of the First National Bank of St. Louis. Mr. Stuart replied:

“You overwhelm me with embarrassment. If I could justly lay claim to the authorship I would be quite willing to make the admission in big type on billboards. The article was cut from some newspaper and if the author’s name was appended, I didn’t notice it.”

As for the attribution to Ullman, that seems to have been made first in a book called The Silver Treasury: Prose and Verse for Every Mood, edited by Jane Manner and published by Samuel French in 1934.

Now, having corrected the Internet (which will nevertheless persist in its incorrectness, because the Internet pays no attention to us at all), we may still ask ourselves why Frank Crane or Anon or anybody else thought so much of youth and so little of age.

It seems to Dr. Boli that the peculiarities of American capitalism may explain much of the sentiment. In the nineteenth century, education slowly expanded until it became universal. Even poor children were given a liberal education: they learned history, they read Shakespeare, they practiced Beethoven on the piano. If they went on to college, the liberal arts were forced on them even if they went to a technical school like Carnegie Tech or MIT.

In other words, they spent their youth in the realm of ideals. They lived with the most glorious productions of human thought.

Then they left school, and they became factory workers and assistant clerks and bank tellers and accountants. They spent the rest of their lives in drudgery for usually unseen masters.

Under these circumstances, it is easy to understand how growing old would seem a curse, and youth would be the golden time of life. The only reasonably happy individual would be the one who could carry enough of those golden days of youth into the drudgery of middle age to have something of a mental life.

The good news is that good old American capitalism, our other most hallowed institution, may at last succeed in scraping the shine off youth in our imaginations. As capitalism muscles its way into the academic world, as universities and public schools are taken over by Masters of Business Administration, as the curriculum down to the kindergarten level is methodically adjusted to produce adequate servants for the masters of capital, new generations of Americans are rising who have no happy memories of a time when their lives were devoted to learning and the contemplation of beauty. They will see youth not as a golden age, but as the early stages of lifelong drudgery. Their only hope will be the possibility of a better future, and they may even, if they are ambitious, take steps to make that future a reality. Then, perhaps, we shall see a generation that knows how to grow old and relishes the process.

Here is an article that is, as the young folks say, very meta.

It is no surprise to readers who come here regularly that everything about Dr. Boli is a bit archaic. He tries to keep up with the latest trends, but T-shirts with printed slogans still strike him as a dangerous or depressing novelty, and he has not yet come to terms with the loss of the distinction between “may” and “might,” which confuses him but gives those young folks who say “very meta” no trouble.

This Magazine itself, even in its electrical form, is a relic of a bygone age. When the Magazine moved to the World-Wide Web, the WordPress software that runs the Magazine was four years old. The iPhone was six months old. “Blogs” were the new big thing.

The last time Dr. Boli did any serious design work on the site was when he moved to his own domain at drboli.com. At that time he decided the whole site needed a fresh look, so he turned for inspiration to the type and layout of general-interest magazines of the middle nineteenth century. That was fresh, in the sense that no other site had anything like it.

Because no other site had anything like it, Dr. Boli had to do the design himself. That required writing some code, and Dr. Boli is not suited for writing code. He did it, because no one else would do it. But he did not enjoy it very much.

That was in 2013, which a glance at the calendar tells us was twelve years ago. Since then, the design of the site—technically known as a “theme,” for connoisseurs of WordPress software—has been growing barnacles while the currents flowed around it. It will probably have to be replaced at some point, when the latest software updates finally bury it at the crossroads with a stake through its heart. But for now it still works, if we are willing to put up with some of its archaisms and patch it with pitch and duct tape every once in a while.

Most of the burden of those archaisms falls on the editor of the Magazine, who is willing to carry it. However, the comment system is primitive, and is likely to remain primitive. When Dr. Boli tried the experiment of installing a simple Markdown parser for comments, it broke the site so completely that nothing would appear but a blank white screen. Many readers would tell us that was an improvement, but it is not the intended look and feel of the site. The intended look has words, and the intended feel is something like the texture of fine linen stationery. Thus we are limited to plain text for most commenters.

However, there is a loophole for the pedantic and the stubborn. The comments will parse basic HTML markup. If you are familiar with some of the rudiments of the language, you can use HTML to add italics, bold, block quotes, and other typographic refinements to your opinions. Here is a very short list of formatting codes you can use.

Italics.

You can use italics for <em>emphasis</em> or to set off the title of a book, like <i>Pendennis</i> by Thackeray. 

That will appear thus:

You can use italics for emphasis or to set off the title of a book, like Pendennis by Thackeray.

Note the two different codes for italics. They lead to the same result, but they are semantically different, and if you are pedantic enough to care about that, you probably do not need this list of HTML formatting codes.

Bold.

You can use bold text for <strong>strong emphasis</strong> or <b>other things that need bolding</b>.

You can use bold text for strong emphasis or other things that need bolding.

Once again, there are two semantically different ways to get bold text. They mean different things to anyone who reads your comment by choosing the “View Page Source” option in the browser. You have no one but yourself to blame if you are mocked for using the wrong one.

Links.

You can use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink">hyperlinks</a> to link to useful information.

You can use hyperlinks to link to useful information.

Links sometimes cause our whimsical spam-suppression system to toss a comment in the trash, but Dr. Boli always finds the comments that end up there within a day or two.

Blockquotes.

You can use blockquotes for extended quotations from another writer. (To use them for extended quotations from yourself suggests an enlarged self-esteem that may need to be lanced.)

<blockquote>

From what torments might the poor simpleton of a modern pietist be saved by remembering that Our Lord “spake not without a parable”! —<i>Coventry Patmore.</i>

</blockquote>

You can use blockquotes for extended quotations from another writer. (To use them for extended quotations from yourself suggests an enlarged self-esteem that may need to be lanced.)

From what torments might the poor simpleton of a modern pietist be saved by remembering that Our Lord “spake not without a parable”! —Coventry Patmore.

Small Capitals.

As a special benefit for readers of this Magazine, you can even insert <sc>small capitals</sc> in your comments. Can any other magazine on line offer you that privilege?

As a special benefit for readers of this Magazine, you can even insert small capitals in your comments. Can any other magazine on line offer you that privilege?

This list is not exhaustive. Ordered and unordered lists will probably also work, and if you delight in coding such lists by hand, go ahead and give it a try. You can even add a horizontal rule.

Or you can just write in plain text, and use a carefully crafted arrangement of well-chosen vocabulary to make your point. That might also work.

Easter Bunny.—The Easter Bunny’s given name is actually Bernard, but he has never succeeded in getting most Americans to take him seriously enough to use the formal version of his name.