"I was making bad decisions before you were born." This is the thing your parents think, but won't say to you. The leverage they purchase from your naivete is their false omniscience. Eventually--at ten when you steal a cigarette, at fifteen when you have sex for the first time, at twenty one when you roll your car and don't tell them--you recognize the limits to their powers, and in so doing you recognize the expansion of your own locus of self. Independence. But this "growing up" is not without its psychic detours; having tasted at the tit of an artificial god, the child leaves the revelation of their parents' fallibility with a thirst that cannot be reversed. They will have their God.
Thus the permutations of the adult's fascination with authority--presidential politics, athletic idolatry, religion itself---are the lingering longing of a once-upon infant for the assurance of, if not love then, security. In the sexual realm, this persistent searching finds its expression in adolescent crushes on teachers or young adult fixations on older, middle-aged--as the Persians termed it--"mentors of love". The omniscient parent's wisdom about life is eclipsed by the surrogate parent's omniscience about all things sexual. A realm in awkward kinship with religion and magic, this carnal knowledge is a profound exposing of the power of the material, of the flesh, of substance as opposed to idea. It is the inherent immediacy of sex that offers (especially in the context of pedagogical romance) the transformative properties of a kind of enlightenment.
On the other hand...
Youth tangles Age in a snare of memory and mortality. The elder recalls the enchantment and liberty of this lost time and stares stupefied into the inevitabilities of his life: decline of body and death. But, by shifting his gaze--at first playfully--into the eyes of his young lover (that first time), he sees possibility where there was regret, hope in the place once occupied by the twin malignancies of doubt and fear. Whether quaintly delusional ("I will make this co-ed my wife.") or infused with philosophical clarity ("That which my protege finds attractive in me is that which is already fading away."), there is perilous association of the other with personal deficits and public humiliations, the function of which is exacerbated by one's ability to censor, edit, rewrite oneself in the eyes of one's young audience.
Interestingly, this very much mirrors the manner in which the parent selectively share's his or her history with their children. Recognizing that there will be distortions in the image they have of her/him, the parent projects the self that will (or that they think will) serve them in the relationship. Parents perpetuate the lie of their own divinity for a modicum of agency. Ultimately in control of their child's knowledge of them (and little else), the parent ends up walking a tight rope between their empathy and their desire to remain all-powerful in their child's cosmology. Because the very lesson of familial relationships is the unnerving disconnect in these connections, neither empathy nor mystery can be considered much of a permanent salve. On the other hand, taking a young lover can't help but work for a little while...
