Unreal

The Champion

I think it's true to say that most of us have been content to lead the sort of half-focussed, stop-start life that has been guided, if that is the word, by poorly-defined and sometimes contradictory goals; a life in which avoidance of personal risk and collateral damage to others have outweighed ambition, which will at least have had the beneficial side-effect of leaving few, or at worst fewer bodies and wreckage in its wake. If you could never bring yourself to believe that it's OK for special people like you to ignore the rules of the road, then you will have spent much time waiting patiently at every red light along the way while others speed recklessly ahead. I have never quite understood the fable of the tortoise and the hare, but I'm pretty sure we're all running out of road and heading for the same destination, and I'm in no hurry to get there before anyone else.

I recently heard from an old work colleague, a man who is deep in one of those intense period of transition between phases of life that inevitably become more familiar as one grows older: his wife was diagnosed with one of the worst cancers some while ago, survived beyond all rational expectation, but has now chosen to forgo any further chemotherapy. A big, brave decision, but understandable when the treatment is both brutal and highly uncertain to deliver a positive result. I can well believe him when he says they are now experiencing an unprecedented spell of peace and serenity. It's a proposition we've all heard, and may all come to live at some time or another: that life becomes more highly-coloured in times of crisis, and – if you are sufficiently prepared, spiritually – that there is no calm quite like the calm acceptance of the inevitable.

My friend also mentioned that he is still keeping in touch with some of the people we worked with, something I'm afraid I have rather neglected; this despite what he described as the increasing unreality of those years, and the fact that most of those colleagues have now left or retired and gone off in their different directions. I know exactly what he means about the unreality. One of my regular walks takes me through the Southampton University campus at Highfield, and every time I pass the imposing brick-built edifice of the library where I used to work I think: I spent decades of my life in there? "Unreal" is hardly the word. He also used a quotation from Joan Didion which really hit the spot: “I’ve already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be”. I retired in 2014 and have since become several new people in my stop-start progress through life, and it seems I've pretty much already lost touch with the man who worked in that building.

Although I had a Didion binge a year or so ago – as I get older, I find I enjoy reading essays more than I enjoy reading fiction – I didn't recognise that quote. I tracked it down easily enough, however, to her piece "On Keeping a Notebook". Here is the relevant passage:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio.
Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Ah, yes, seventeen-year-old me... I, too, would dearly like to know again what it feels like, say, to be sitting on a playground swing late on a starry night after a dizzying encounter with a new girlfriend – at midnight, in fact, when all the streetlights in my town used to go off simultaneously – waiting for the high to subside enough to be able to face the prospect of going home. Impossible, though; that young lad was somebody I lost touch with a very long time ago, and that particular manifestation of "home" was reduced to rubble in 2008. His hopes, dreams, and fears are completely out of reach, intense as they were. I could look in his notebooks, I suppose – I know where he keeps them – but, like Joan Didion, I expect I'd find that they are full of some other person's baffling and cryptic notations.

All of which reminded me of a post from a few years ago, about the "elective family" of that youngster, which I thought I'd reread. And, as so often seems to be the case, I found that the person who wrote that post, just five years ago, seems to be a better writer than me. Which surely cannot be true, but then we are always less harsh on the efforts of a stranger than on our own, aren't we?

Serenity