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and myself.I look forward to my writing alienating some of you but others of you will become readers for life. You’re all welcome however long you stick around.
The basic format is five posts a month, with three free for everybody and two paywalled; the publishing schedule is every Thursday morning GMT and then a longer read the last Sunday of the month.
Now, on with today.
I miss the old sadness. I mean the safe sadness, that sort of aesthetic melancholy, often adopted from cultural material, a sort of harmless recitation of adult lamentation, of saying ‘Life is rendered futile by death’ long before death seems a realistic prospect. That is as opposed to the deep, disabling middle-aged sadness, the realization that no, in fact, you were right, you actually are going to die. The safe sadness which you can snap out of in an afternoon rather than the sadness that leaves you sat on the edge of your bed at 3AM with the world grabbing your throat.
The later sadness also isn’t one you even choose. You are in the supermarket and it comes over you. You are saddened by a memory of a bad situation. You remember someone is dead. No matter how hard you try and no matter how good your attitude is to things, a certain hollow melancholy creeps back in. Once you’ve sorted out which part of it is just digestion, there is still this sadness; of time being gone, of relationships which are precious or fragile or durational simply dissipating over time, and the only refuge seeming to be in turning to the past, of retracing the stages which led you to the stage you are at, time rendered safe by having already been lived through.
What sadness becomes more and more as you get older is a sort of accumulation of difficult situations within yourself, a sort of limescale of the soul. Of course, you remember the good times too, the happy holiday here, the magical night where something came off. It’s not a matter of dwelling on difficult moments – you feel them in your bones. And though hell is certainly not other people, they can certainly get you a good deal of the way there.
I don’t want to be dismissive of others but it becomes clear as you gain experience that, while many people in life are embarked on lifelong journey of personal growth, others are quite happy to stick at the maturity of about the age of 22. The world is just as much theirs as anyone else’s. More than anything else, it is this certain crassness and coarseness in the behaviour of others which, almost unbeknownst to you, chips away at your relish for life. I sometimes imagine a companion volume to the book ‘1001 things to do before you die’ entitled ‘1001 things you will have to do repeatedly which you have no desire to’, which you bear in mind as you sit through yet another Frank Sinatra impersonator performing at someone’s wedding.
I’m being grumpy. Once upon a time, the idea that I could be disillusioned by life would have been utterly foreign to me. There is and was so much to do and see! Of course, I hadn’t factored in physical decline, that the body itself begins to wear out. But to know that the soul itself might get tired after a brief 80-90 years, fewer even, that I’d begin to understand these old people who say ‘I’ve had enough now’ – it would have seemed to me unfathomable that within a short human lifespan people get bored of things. A middle-aged man I once knew, in truth one of the unhappier people I’ve known, told me once that everywhere around him he saw people just waiting to die. To the extent that is true, I put that largely down to what I’ve been describing, the internal agglomeration of bullshit and classless behaviour.
What also adds to the way people relinquish their hold on life is that your cohort gradually gets wiped out. Right now my generation of old Millennials is pretty much at our peak; we’re raising our families, we’re starting to run things, we’re producing some of our best art. It’s our moment. But over the next decades more and more of our lives will begin to find their ends, moving from those checking out unexpectedly early to those who at least had a bit of a run. Gradually I will encounter less and less people who knew what it was like to grow up in the England of the 1980s. Precious knowledge, such as how to program a VCR, will be lost to the mists of time. Eventually, those who remember the world my lot were born in will dwindle to such an extent that we feel ourselves washed up on some strange future shore. Though we can play a consultative role to a new generation, and should, it will necessarily never be the same role we played in our own as we moved through our life stages together.
I’m a pretty healthy guy, known to run the odd long race, and given this it sometimes really baffles me that in 30-40 years I’ll be – and this if I’m lucky – coming to the end of my life regardless of what I do or don’t do. This immutable state of affairs seems so incongruous with the vitality and acuity I feel now; between you and me, I feel myself to be currently, in terms of how I’m writing and how I’m living, at something of a peak. It is a strange combination of being adamantine in the present and clearly seeing, as the future comes rushing down the pipes, that imminent old man. As you get older and your sense of chronology more indistinct, time becomes more porous, and you feel yourself to already be what you will be.
By the age of 40, you also have a pretty good idea about which problems of life are intrinsic to its pursuit. Despite the toxic positivity culture the Americans – who, to their credit, are as a culture seemingly devoted to not accepting any life problem as being entirely without a solution – there are a lot of things about life which, in its evolutionary design, you can lament but not change. It’s enough of a bother to accept them in the first place without thinking you might actually do something about them.
For my part, I find the set-up around reproductive biology almost too brutal to take; the fact that most heterosexual adult lives are consecrated to raising your own replacements who, by the very design of the thing, are themselves compelled to grow up and undergo the same process seems to me as a core of life soberingly unsentimental. Not only that but you’re supposed to like it. But there isn’t really anything I can do about reproductive biology, or any of the other aspects of life which bother me – the vastness of human history and culture, for example, and the incredibly limited part of it you can experience in your life. It’s enough just trying to accept these hard facts with grace rather than going regressing to the point of trying to think you can change them.
You can end up feeling that nothing that you want from life is possible. I’d like to be irresistible to women, and also faithful to my wife; I’d like to have been hugely successful as a writer, but ten years ago; I’d like to be 19 again, but in 2004, or 1976, but also with all the knowledge I have now. I’d like to travel all eras of history and speak every language and play every instrument. I would like to live to the age of 1000, but in a body which never gets old; I’d like to go to Mars but, to echo Philip Larkin, would prefer to come back the same day. I’d like to know what it felt like to have children without having them and, if I didn’t like it, be able to take them back; I’d like to lose my accent in the foreign languages I’ve learnt to speak.
But I can’t do all that; I’m a 41-year old with a receding hairline and a busy job. In early middle age, my mental landscape is dotted with infills of accepted sadnesses, things I dreamt of but realized I would never or could never have, or, more weirdly, outgrew; to the extent I’ve ever had a solution to any of these mixed feelings, it’s to write. But I don’t think writing is a ‘miracle’ – I think it’s a consolation.
There is one dream I have which seems more feasible. I’d like to live in a small Italian town. Pretty, I’d imagine, certainly on the coast. I’d like to have a small apartment there, with heavy wooden furnishings. I’d read the paper every day, and take a book down to the café, and have a little coffee, and speak Italian with a pretty good accent which improved every year. I’d like to still be writing, but putting the cherries on top now, having published many books and got my two or three big ones done. Occasionally attractive young journalists would come to interview me about them. I’d conduct interviews in all the languages I speak, French, German and English, though I’d avoid the latter language as much as I could. I wouldn’t think about artificial intelligence, or automation, or the discovery of life on the moons of Jupiter, and would instead spend the years privately preparing, in living for the moment, to eternally clock off.
Meanwhile in my thoughts, I’d plunge into the past, into the England of the ‘80s, or the Berlin of the 2000s, or my decade in London, all part of the whole story now, to sift through the memories of the many I have loved, that period of time which was given to me to watch over and consider. Anything after that is for others to deal with, beyond the end of my shift.
"I don’t want to be dismissive of others but it becomes clear as you gain experience that, while many people in life are embarked on lifelong journey of personal growth, others are quite happy to stick at the maturity of about the age of 22." *sight* I have been thinking the same; something a good friend of mine often says is that I experience everything so much more intensely, whether good or bad, that it is futile to expect to communicate my human experience with everyone. I think you are similar. Some people are just more sensitive and more melancholic and presumably is what drives us to write. But there are benefits to the capacity to feel great, lingering sadness. It signifies the capacity also to feel great, ecstatic joy. I cry often, but I also feel like I am high on drugs on nothing more than coffee and a good breakfast.
Pangou pangou pangou fishy in the sea. Oh, he's a little bear with a round tummy.