This is the fourth in a new weekly series of micro-essays using weird, wild, and wonderful words from Dr. Waffle’s venerable list.
epigone, n.
One of a succeeding generation. Chiefly in plural the less distinguished successors of an illustrious generation.
In plural < French épigones, < Latin epigonī, < Greek ἐπίγονοι, plural of ἐπίγονος born afterwards, <ἐπί upon, after + ‑γονος, < root of γίγνεσθαι to be born.
Our Bad
Dante’s Divine Comedy has one of the grabbiest openings in all of world literature:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
One of the reasons it’s so famous, I contend, is that it makes a cheap and easy opening epigraph for any essay on middle age, aging in general, or intergenerational difference—in other words, 97.2% of all essays read or written by people over the age of 40. But I do wonder if the reason the “straightforward pathway” is temporarily lost in middle age is that it’s here one must make a difficult psychic shift, from measuring oneself against elders and ancestors to worrying about one’s epigoni. It’s rarely a comfortable proposition: who among us (even—or especially—the childless) feels they have done enough to secure the prosperity, happiness, and spiritual comfort of future generations? Maybe the reason we Gen Xers and millenials are so pissed off at the Zoomers—their smartphone addictions, their perceived ChatGPT abuse, whatever the hell is going on with their bluejeans—is that we don’t want to think about the state of the world we are leaving them. We inherited a pretty nice planet, those of us born before 1980 or so, and we had a good run of neighborhood kickball games, childhood vaccinations, affordable higher education, and rope swings over clear running rivers. Sorry about the mess we’re leaving you, kids. Welcome to the desert of the real.