Kicker: A meditation on the mysterious stretch of life between youth and old age—where endurance becomes wisdom and myth becomes meaning.
The Missing Middle
Biographical, poetic, and philosophical views
The discussions between old friends who reunite after many years typically include elements of nostalgia as well as humor and underlying sorrow. The middle period that disappeared between youth and old age becomes the main subject of their conversations. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer offers a darker interpretation: The missing middle represents not only time that has slipped away but meaningful experiences that disappeared.
Pull quote: “Two old friends who shared their youth sail through time to meet again in old age like survivors of a shipwreck.”
This is more than melancholy. It’s metaphysical.
The Shipwreck of Becoming
Schopenhauer believed that life is not a linear journey, but rather akin to a shipwreck. As people get older they hold onto fragments and memories along with a tired understanding of how suffering and illusions have worn away so much of their past. In his perspective, the period of middle life that should represent development and blossoming becomes instead a void passage of gradual decay.
Pull quote: “The middle of life stands as a place where entropy, along with disillusion and suffering, erodes what we are instead of enabling us to become ourselves.”
There is no triumph here—only endurance.
Tennyson’s Defiant Middle
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses offers a powerful image of old age through its portrayal of heroic persistence. The final curtain falls with death, but something before the end remains. Even in old age men can accomplish deeds that earn them noble recognition:
“Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.”
Even though Ulysses has reached old age, he retains his fervor. His longing centers on future adventures and fresh insights instead of time that has passed.
“Though much is taken, much abides…”
The will to pursue objectives persists until the final moment of resistance. Even as middle life nears its end, Tennyson’s Ulysses reinforces its reality. Schopenhauer accepts the emptiness of life as a reality, while Ulysses actively challenges it.
A Philosophical Divergence
An underlying metaphysical stance rather than temperament distinguishes these two perspectives:
Schopenhauer: Life is suffering; resignation is wisdom.
Tennyson: Life is struggle; rebellion is meaning.
Pull quote: “Temperament differences between these two perspectives arise from divergent metaphysical commitments.”
Two friends who once shared a table at the café remember their past differently, as one views ruins while the other sees the harbor.
Kicker: Where Did the Soul Go? Norman Mailer searched for a place between mass vulgarity and sterile elitism—a cultural and moral middle we may still be missing.
Title: Cultural Division: Norman Mailer and the Search for the Missing Middle
Body: Norman Mailer stood uneasily between two poles of modern American life. Mass culture, he believed, was manipulative and vulgar, flattening the complexities of real life into digestible distractions. Yet high culture, with all its intellectual refinement, often felt bloodless to him—disconnected from human struggle and moral engagement. In Advertisements for Myself, he lambasts both the crude commercialism of middlebrow literature and the aloof pretensions of the literary elite. What Mailer wanted was something rare: art that was both intellectually daring and emotionally honest.
This absence of balance extended into morality. Mailer saw society polarizing between chaotic rebellion and deadened conformity. In The White Negro, his ideal of the “hipster” lives intensely in a morally flattened world, rejecting the “square” but not quite offering a new center. For Mailer, the spiritual dialectic—the battle between good and evil, soul and ego—had vanished.
He found a similar lack of nuance in American politics, where technocrats on one side and ideologues on the other replaced real moral vision. In his coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Mailer skewered both revolutionaries and establishment figures for relying on cliches rather than courageous, risky engagement.
Mailer believed we had lost the middle ground: the place where moral struggle, spiritual risk, and psychological honesty could happen. Influenced by existentialism and psychoanalysis, he wrote of characters like those in An American Dream, who hover between repression and chaos, trying to find a third way that doesn’t lead to either.
His sensibility resonates with thinkers like R.D. Laing, who saw modern identity split by social expectation; with Nietzsche, who hunted for new values in the void left by God; and with Kierkegaard, who sought an ethical life between aesthetic indulgence and religious submission.
Mailer called us to the middle: not a compromise, but a crucible—the difficult place where real change begins.
SEO Tags: Norman Mailer, missing middle, cultural criticism, mass culture vs high culture, moral struggle, American politics, existentialism, R.D. Laing, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, hipster, the White Negro, An American Dream, spiritual dialectic
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