The Shadow Line.

• Author: Oakeshott, Michael Joseph
• Position: Line between youth and adulthood

Politics is an activity unsuited to the young, not on account of their vices but on account of what I at least consider to be their virtues....Everybody's young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept....Some unfortunate people, like Pitt (laughably called 'the Younger'), are born old, and are eligible to engage in politics almost in their cradles; others, perhaps more fortunate, belie the saying that one is young only once, they never grow up. But these are exceptions. For most there is what Conrad called the 'shadow line' which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with...