A friend asked me recently what I was looking forward to. I’ll be honest, I struggled. It’s not that there aren't many things I still enjoying doing – but to actually look forward to say, having a cup of coffee tomorrow, sometimes seems harder to achieve. I have had a few by now. I don’t have kids, so I don’t even have the excitement ahead of them eventually leaving. Or indeed the goofball excitement kids have about things; I remember, myself a kid, being on the playground at school and having back home a new VHS of the X-Files (you’d buy the individual episodes on VHS before they got UK released in those days) to watch, and feeling that I could hardly wait, so hungry was I to get back to the other world.
In the same spirit, one of the things I still really do get excited about is new work by the artists I like. I mean ones you really like, the ones who are in whatever your personal little pantheon looks like, ‘your guys’ as Marc Maron loves to say. Well into my 30s, I’d be wildly excited by the prospect of a new Terrence Malick film, and I’ll always put aside time to properly listen to a new album from Beirut. There’s something about seeing whatever move an artist you really like has made next which remains perpetually thrilling – particularly if they keep up a hot streak. There’s a novel which has a great hook, ‘Waiting for Kate’, about a man who decides not to commit suicide because Kate Bush might release a new album. Honestly, there are worse reasons, and she did.
That’s one of the reasons I feel such intense nostalgia for youth, a nostalgia I even felt when I was young; it was one the one time of life where everybody around me was passionately into writing, music and art, as opposed to it being just the province of overcultured weirdos like myself. It was the time when everyone was defining themselves and cultural choices were a way of communicating that, sharing it as both a way to stand out and find like-minded people. Of course, we were trying too to find our stuff, the stuff which our parents had no idea about – for my money I’m part of the ‘Moon Safari’ and ‘OK Computer’ generation – but we were also bringing to the party precisely the stuff our parents had got us into. My Mum and Dad got me into Paul Simon and Johnny Cash; my first girlfriend gave me a CD with Leonard Cohen, Dire Straits and Joni Mitchell. Plus James Taylor.
You miss that as you get older; people get too busy and either no longer have time or don’t make it a priority to keep up. Very few people have the same passion for culture at 47 as at 17, and of course, there’s no generation who knows your culture like you own. I guess this deep connection to culture has, until recently, made me naturally inclined to look back; I’m a rather sentimental and nostalgic person, and nothing seems as exciting to me as the time that you had most of life ahead of you. It’s the safety of the past too which also to some degree appeals, the knowledge that, tho they were dangers and tribulations coming at 17, they did end up being withstood. Ahead is always more uncertain, and sometimes my future right now looks like just a plume of black; I’d still like to go to The Maldives, the Faroes Islands, Tashkent and Caldey Island, but there’s no guarantee of the funds or time to allow that to happen. So I take refuge in recalling the times of my life where in the end things largely worked out.
Personally I’m an outlier, as I’ve have carried on with the exact same passion for films, reading and music that I had when a teenager. If you start young, you really can get through more cultural artefacts than you think. One of the things I find satisfying about getting older is finally getting round to reading books I’d meant to for ages; I recently finished Saul Bellow’s ‘More Die of Heartbreak’, a novel I’d had on my list, largely due to its title, for over ten years. Now tho I’m a man who has read ‘More Die of Heartbreak’ – even tho in future I’ll likely remember at most one or two moments of it. Over time I’m filling in more of my cultural gaps, becoming more of a completist of the things I’ve liked; by now, I’ve seen ‘The Godfather Part III’, I’ve heard every Talking Heads record, I have just a handful of Shakespeare plays left. My tastes have grown better and richer too. For all I miss those days of intense pop cultural shorthand in our teens, I think few of us had developed a sense of what was good work, deep work, then.
Yet I wonder if people return a little to that earlier passion for art as they get older. They’ll have more time again, for one. When I think of being older, the one image I really like is being part of one of those old couples who go to all the shows, those snacked-up pensioners who form the staple of many audiences. Hell, I might even one day get to be in an audience or two for my own work given all the plays I’ve written.
However busy people get with work and childrearing the existential questions always come back – the kind of question art provides not a solution to but a theatre to explore. It’s just impossible to stop humans questioning who they are and why they are for long. There are no permanent answers, just answers which suffice for a while.
So that would be something I’m looking forward to – seeing more people reemerge in later life, their careers being to diminish or their children departing the home, with a renewed sense of needing to ask ‘What’s it all about?’ Particularly as the OK Computer cohort out more and more that the death thing is very much on. Maybe some of us will rediscover that hunger for art as an essential experience once again and come and reengage on that basis; after all, I’ve spent much of my own life finding out how other people have responded to the fundamental questions and come with plenty of material to recommend. We might even get another Kate Bush album one day too.