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.
To the extent math refers to reality, we are not certain to the extent we are certain, math does not refer to reality.
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
When at eve, at the bounding of the landscape, the heavens appear to recline so slowly on the earth, imagination pictures beyond the horizon an asylum of hope, - a native land of love; and nature seems silently to repeat that man is immortal.
For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty.
If the black box flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn’t the whole airplane made out of that stuff?
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
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