We see things differently when we are children. Time, especially. The world seems boundless to a child, and life’s horizon remote as the stars. As we age, we learn better; time flies and those horizons rush toward us.

The gift of age is wisdom, supposedly. If you’ve been around long enough, and if you’ve been even occasionally thinking about your life, you’re bound to come to know a little something, at least. You almost can’t help it, though plenty of people seem to make a good run at knowing next to nothing after spending decades on the planet. Most of us, however, manage to gain a little something in the way of wisdom. And the world needs that something, the world needs the long view that comes with long years and some genuine reflection. But let’s not overrate it.

One of my favorite essays in English literature is Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “Crabbed Age and Youth.” It’s a blistering, gibing indictment of the smug certainty about life that can creep in with the years, along with the many other unfortunate conditions associated with growing old. Creaking joints, age spots, smug certainty. We can drone on, can’t we, my friends, about how “Back in my day…” or “One thing I’ve learned over the years…” or “That young man (or woman) will learn soon enough that…” My own kids, from 29-year-old Madeleine to 9-year-old Mary Lou give me the business but good whenever I start in like that and get lost in the certainty that Old Ways Are Best. (N.B.: They often are, and so when necessary I am undeterred by the mockery of my children.)

Robert Louis Stevenson died young, at 44, and never fell prey to this particular malady of age; he was also denied the gifts that long years can bring. Perhaps he would have softened his tone had he written about all this at an older age. But English literature would surely be the lesser.

“It is held to be a good taunt,” Stevenson writes, “and somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman waggles his head and says: ‘Ah, so I thought when I was your age.’ It is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: ‘My venerable sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours.’ And yet the one is as good as the other.”

Why, Stevenson asks, are the opinions and perceptions of the young so easily doubted and even dismissed? Don’t we remember how right we were when we were young?

That’s a wisecrack, of course, but there’s something in it. “If youth is a mistake, time will surely cure me of it,” William Pitt the Younger, who became Prime Minister of Great Britain at 24, supposedly said. Time cures one’s mistakes, maybe, if we’re lucky. But we also can lose something in the passing of time, something very important, something we need right now: Daring.

The capacity to dare, to seize the day and set out in it with a bold dream of what can be achieved and a brave heart to make the effort—we often lose that as the years take their toll. We close down. We become calculating about risk. We narrow our vision of what is possible in any given day.

In his essay, Stevenson sensed that shadow closing in, and even at 38 years old, he was looking backwards when he offered this marvelous paean to the glory of being young:

“Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud HERNANI.”

(I had to look up “Hernani.” It was a play by Victor Hugo that shocked the French public of the 1840s and sparked riots.)

The gift of childhood and youth is daring. The days call to be adventured in, the years stretch out like a road in the moonlight—beautiful, full of possibilities and wonder, endless.

When I was in eighth grade, my family moved to a new house far outside the city of Chicago, close to the broad farmlands of northern Illinois. At night, late—after midnight—you could hear a train whistle in the near distance, a low, slightly sorrowful chord dopplering past and then fading out towards Elgin. That sound was so beautiful to me; that sound became like a friend to me, speaking of longing and adventure and loss. It dared me. It said, maybe: The world doesn’t really have boundaries. I’ve spent half a century chasing it.

Right now, many Americans are disheartened, their spirits crushed by the relentless march of the Trumpist project to change our country and turn it into something ugly, cruel, intolerant, and authoritarian. Trump himself wants his opponents to lose heart, to feel like his triumph is inevitable, and the transformation of the United States is unstoppable. Given the fact that he has only been in office for nine months, and given also the grim fact that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court have evinced the slightest willingness or capacity to check him, the prospects for our beloved country might look very dark indeed.

But deep down, you don’t really believe that, do you? You know (yes?) that it will be really, really hard, but we are going to save our country. Trumpism will not be the end of the American story. Trump will not succeed. It will take a huge effort, a spirit of practical cooperation and solidarity among millions of us—and a child’s sense of daring.

Our poem this week splendidly captures the power of a youthful heart to summon unexpected energies in the face of doubt and danger. It’s called, “Where Lies the Land,” and it’s by the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough (pronounced “Kluff”). Like Stevenson, Clough died young, at 42, but in his short life, he wrote some marvelous verses; “Say not the struggle nought availeth” was a favorite of my father’s, and of President John F. Kennedy.

This poem, which I found in a book of poetry for children that I got when Johanna and I were living in London and our kids were little, was written for adults, not children. But Clough writes about courage here with the directness and verve and daring of youth, while still telling the truth about how hard and scary it can be sometimes to find your courage. The young understand this. The rest of us need to remember it.

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Where lies the land to which the ship would go?Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.And where the land she travels from? Away,Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

On sunny noons upon the deck’s smooth face,Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace!Or, o’er the stern reclining, watch belowThe foaming wake far widening as we go.

On stormy nights while wild north-westers rave,How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!The dripping sailor on the reeling mastExults to bear, and scorns to wish it past.

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.And where the land she travels from? Away,Far, far behind, is all that they can say.