July/Aug 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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• INTELLECTUM VERO VALDE AMA •
Greatly love the intellect

I began to cry and had to stop reading when I reached page 160 of Mary Pipher's Another Country (Riverhead, 1999). It is not that I am a weeper by nature, nor that the author stoked me with sentimentality as Sheldon VanAuken did with his six-Kleenex finale to A Severe Mercy. Rather, I choked with emotion at this and other points in Pipher's book precisely be cause she so carefully reports the poignancy of our inevitable aging, the demands it makes upon us to accept decline and mortality—and the grace and generosity with which some arrive at that acceptance, while others battle the ineluctable with the blunt blade of bitterness.

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One popular book about communication suggests the sexes are from different planets. Pipher locates the generations in different "time zones." Her book might have been titled Boomers Are from Pacific Standard Time and Their Parents Are from Greenwich.

Her idea is simple: different eras produce people with differing sensibilities. Not only do these time zones shape us, but as times are a-changin' we continue to have one foot in our time zone of origin. Thus the make-it-do-or-do-without stewardship and husbandry of those in the Depression time zone can look like miserliness and hoarding to those in the more affluent boomer zone. And the uninhibited expressiveness of the Esalen generation can sound like self-absorption, self-pity, and sheer whining to their more reserved elders.

The biggest difference between the time zones, says Pipher, is the therapeutic culture. "We've gone from Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes, to Minnesota, land of 10,000 treatment centers." Those in the boomer zone have learned to ...