The bias of youth

 So why did I leave two of my favorites off a list of 12 short stories?

Perhaps we have a bias for stories we read when young. Memories of them have been with us for a lifetime. Sometimes, those stories shape you. Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” had that affect on me. When I finished reading it, I wanted to learn how to write short stories.

Perhaps it’s a bit like first love. The first experiences of anything tends to stay in memory.

I discovered Willa Cather’s “Neighbor Rosicky” and Guy Davenport’s “John Charles Tapner” when I was past middle age. They strike me now as better stories, far more interesting than most of the works that astonished me when I was young.

You’d expect a person’s tastes to mature with age.

At 15, I thought that Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” had to be best thing anyone had written.

As I got older, my view of what a good human being changed, and so my view of what a good story is had to change too. I spent my teenage years in the navy. And when I got out, feeling old at 20, my idea of a good man didn’t include much of the kind of heroism London wrote about.

As the Russian writer Ilya Selvinski put it, “This was the first cigar we smoked in our youth.”