Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, 'Well, so-and-so will like this,' which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
Interpretation
As we age and lose our peers, we must rely on our own judgments and preferences without seeking external validation.
Gore Vidal's quote reflects the notion that as we grow older, especially when we lose contemporaries, we face a deeper sense of solitude. This solitude brings both an empowering realization that we no longer seek approval or companionship from others when expressing ourselves, yet it also carries a somber acknowledgement of isolation, as we become solely responsible for our perspectives and tastes. In doing so, we transition from valuing external opinions to embracing our individuality.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a retirement speech to reflect on personal growth.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
I know too well that these arguments from probabilities are imposters, and unless great caution is observed in the use of them, they are apt to be deceptive.
Institutions mistake good intentions for objectives. They say "health care"; that's an intention, not an objective.
The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don't fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.
Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark, what discord follows!
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