After all, it's obvious that wood aging has tremendous transformative powers -- it's why we age everything from sherry to Scotch in it.
In her poem Solomon Grundy, Alice Oswald takes the opposite tack, converting the fatal weekend of the original into a transformative, magical coming-of-age, in which the eponymous Solomon blooms, and is transformed into something very like a butterfly or a poet.
More broadly, Labour, like the centre-left across Europe, needs a coherent response to the trends of the modern age – accelerating globalisation, transformative technological change and the long-term affordability and effectiveness of the welfare state.
And his claim that the deprived half of humanity, those struggling to live on $2 a day, are impervious to the internet age ignores the transformative power of mobile communications he himself witnessed in Kenya.
The transformative aspects of the Gigabit Age are the human experiences they will enable: blink-of-an-eye/finish-your-sentence responsiveness (latency), real-world-quality resolution (bandwidth), empowerment to create (symmetrical download/upload) and always-on connectivity (Quality-of-Service).
For middle age to be genuinely transformative we need to change the script – scrutinise our mistakes, admit grief and regret, confront personal failings.
I might argue that Jobs is the first truly transformative figure to die in an age of transformative technology.
Nevertheless, it was a transformative time to be coming-of-age.
