Older and wiser 2 essay

Most children in North America learn at an early age that the "Thirteen Colonies" revolted in and after eight long hard years won their independence with the Treaty of Paris in

Lawrence THE HANDLE, which varies in length according to the height of its user, and in some cases is made by that user to his or her specifications, is like most of the other parts of the tool in that it has a name and thus a character of its own. I call it the snath, as do most of us in the UK, though variations include the snathe, the snaithe, the snead, and the sned.

Onto the snath are attached two hand grips, adjusted for the height of the user. On the bottom of the snath is a small hole, a rubberized protector, and a metal D-ring with two hex sockets. Into this little assemblage slides the tang of the blade. This thin crescent of steel is the fulcrum of the whole tool.

From the genus blade fans out a number of ever-evolving species, each seeking out and colonizing new niches.

I also have a couple of ditch blades which, despite the name, are not used for mowing ditches in particular, but are all-purpose cutting tools that can manage anything from fine grass to tousled brambles and a bush blade, which is as thick as a billhook and can take down small trees.

These are the big mammals you can see and hear. Beneath and around them scuttle any number of harder-to-spot competitors for the summer grass, all finding their place in the ecosystem of the tool. None of them, of course, is any use at all unless it is kept sharp, really sharp: You need to take a couple of stones out into the field with you and use them regularly—every five minutes or so—to keep the edge honed.

And you need to know how to use your peening anvil, and when. When the edge of your blade thickens with overuse and oversharpening, you need to draw the edge out by peening it—cold-forging the blade with hammer and small anvil. Probably you never master it, just as you never really master anything.

That lack of mastery, and the promise of one day reaching it, is part of the complex beauty of the tool. Etymology can be interesting. Scythe, originally rendered sithe, is an Old English word, indicating that the tool has been in use in these islands for at least a thousand years.

But archaeology pushes that date much further out; Roman scythes have been found with blades nearly two meters long. Basic, curved cutting tools for use on grass date back at least ten thousand years, to the dawn of agriculture and thus to the dawn of civilizations.

Like the tool, the word, too, has older origins. The Proto-Indo-European root of scythe is the word sek, meaning to cut, or to divide.

Sek is also the root word of sickle, saw, schism, sex, and science. Some books do that, from time to time, and this is beginning to shape up as one of them. By his own admission, his arguments are not new. But the clarity with which he makes them, and his refusal to obfuscate, are refreshing.

I seem to be at a point in my life where I am open to hearing this again. Here are the four premises with which he begins the book: Technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster. Only the collapse of modern technological civilization can avert disaster.

What is needed is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society. I have a tendency toward sentimentality around these issues, so I appreciate his discipline. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, if I do end up agreeing with him—and with other such critics I have been exploring recently, such as Jacques Ellul and D.

Lewis and Ivan Illich—I am going to have to change my life in quite profound ways. It has a broadband connection and all sorts of fancy capabilities I have never tried or wanted to use.

I mainly use it for typing. You might think this makes me a hypocrite, and you might be right, but there is a more interesting observation you could make.Disregarding any mental illness or decline, people do generally get wiser as they grow older as they accumulate more knowledge and experience.

This is comparing to oneself and not to others. People have different intelligence, different exposure, education, experience etc and they learn different stuff at different rates.

It was one of the rules which, above all others, made Doctor Franklin the most amiable of men in society, "never to contradict anybody." If he was urged to announce an opinion, he did it rather by asking questions, as if for information, or by suggesting doubts.

Online Subscription. Unlock this article, and thousands more from our complete 55+ year archive, by subscribing at the low introductory rate of just $1 an issue – that’s 10 issues online plus six months of full archive access for just $ Conversely, there’s Alyssa a 19 year old college girl.

She spends some nights partying away, but usually will sleep until 2 p.m. the next day. Paul Kingsnorth is a writer and poet living in Cumbria, England. He is the author of several books, including the poetry collection Kidland and his fictional debut The Wake, winner of the Gordon Burn Prize and the Bookseller Book of the Year Award.

Kingsnorth is the cofounder and director of the Dark Mountain Project, a network of writers, artists, and thinkers.

Most children in North America learn at an early age that the "Thirteen Colonies" revolted in and after eight long hard years won their independence with the Treaty of Paris in