Youth is boring because everything a youth does is directly or indirectly related to biological reproduction.

Adults – and there are fewer adults than we think – are preoccupied with spiritual reproduction, or to put it in more conventional (but for that reason more readily misunderstandable) terms: culture.

Culture is humankind reinventing ourselves out of our last reinvention, again and again, in generational chains of existence. Each generation could be called the son or daughter of humankind, if you have an ear for that kind of language.

*

Culture is the domain of adults. Within it youth strives for adulthood. Culture dominated by youth, where adults cling to youth and simulate youth, is culture in decline. The directional implication of decline is important.

*

We think we are lonely because we have no community; that is, we lack means to unite our aggregation of friends. That is only the foreground. The background, the missing ground, of genuine, nourishing being-with, seeing-with, feeling-with – is culture. But we degrade culture by objectifying it into an aggregate of foreground artifacts. In fact, culture is what envelops us as we share the intersubjective experience of meaningful artifacts.

Our art traditions are the blueness of water under the ensphering sky. When we share a love of something we are together and we know with perfect certainty we are not alone.

(Human self-reinvention is the heights. The primordial ground is the base. The strange, mute instincts that flow up into us from who-knows-where is the depths. The depth of a thinker is his unbroken existential span, from knowing participation in depth, through reflective knowledge, to knowing participation in height.)

(Reading together is the intimacy of intimacies.)