So, You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
A sixty-ish owner-occupier of an antique shop on Fifth Avenue pokes his head out of his front door minutes before a weekday opening. He is greeting an eager shopper. Looking at his red face, I’m thinking of the spirit of a newborn, fresh out of the womb.
*
I don’t know if I’m having a midlife crisis exactly. Novelist Douglas Coupland in his predictable “Player One” writes that once a person has reached thirty-five she’s pretty much done, as in going to have the life that’s been circumscribed over those previous three and a half decades. What’s more, he says, echoing Schopenhauer (“The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary”), what in the world were you thinking. At twenty-five, that you could be a rock star, or a power forward for the Leafs? Ha! Might as well settle in to the role of consuming our limited natural resources to negative sum game and abandon the idea that you are providing the planet any quantifiable benefits.
Bummer. Which brings me to the phrase midlife crisis. The very idea of it is this: You (in cultural terms, typically a guy) wake up one day to realize that you’ve suddenly grown old and chances are you will not realize your childhood or young adult dream that you’d thought you’d reconciled yourself, but not even close .¤.¤.
Consider yourself in crisis. What to do? Well, something that in your addled middle age you feel will balance against this gaping hole of a loss. For the romantic dreamer, an affair; for the car lover, a blood-orange Sunbeam coupe http://bit.ly/vb50R1, for the pro athlete once-upon-a-wannabe, a marathon, in each case vainly trying to fill the void. Because these pursuits-to-goals can’t bridge the existential swamp you’re feeling in your advancing age. Inevitably you’ll feel worse than before. And on the other side, the abyss: Old age.
Cultural norms are not so easily thrown off. (If the sociologists promise me a crisis, well goddammit, I’m going to have one!) Funny thing is, and maybe it has something to do with the running I do, I don’t feel these phases apply to the current life I am living. (Schopenhauer again: “The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.”) Outlook, too. But as I write these notes on the subway today (Nov. 2), a month into my 57th year, I don’t feel the age thing too harshly. On a run I did today with Thurb, at times I close my eyes and think and feel that I’m in my twenties.
Expect a lot to be written and published in the next twenty years about rites of passage. (No, not dog books by the likes of the new clueless Queen of Media, Jill Abramson http://bit.ly/rFdsqD; I just don’t know where to categorize that sucker.) And not about birth, either. Our opinion leaders are nothing if not long in the tooth (word to the wise: gums move back and teeth appear longer) and chock full of fear. About death, that is.
Such matters can be discussed in eloquence. Take James Wood’s http://nyr.kr/sHfgPK Shelf Life essay in this week’s New Yorker, an elegy, not without its unflinching opinion, that arose from Wood’s circumstances of having to manage the assessment and dispersal of a private library, one belonging to his deceased father-in-law. Here is the story of a life of books as touchstones. But, again, not in any sentimental way. Imagine a century from now. How quaint to think of a slip of paper falling out of a book held by a young literate surviving family member, one that bears the words: “He had marked the most famous places, and circled them: on the Asia Minor side, Aeolia, Lycia, Troy, Phrygia; and on the Greek side the honeyed, haunted, lost names – Illyria, Elis, Attica, Argolis and Arcadia.”
So as we grow inexorably older what do we change? Consider, of course, David Bowie: “Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.”
Change may indeed not be necessay. (In 2008, it was, of course. But had the damage already been done in the previous eight years by Bush and Cheney? Running up such extreme annual deficits that here we are just days away from having our total debt bigger than our gross domestic product http://nyp.st/t17TgJ; in any case, Obama, as anyone can see, has not been up to the job.)
Think of this: You see a person who you have not seen for quite awhile. At my age that can be years, perhaps even decades. More often than not we cannot think of his name, if he happens upon us out of the blue because he has changed so much that he’s hardly recognizable. (And not for the better.) They look all too often old, mirthless. What the character Rick observes in “Player One” (above).
The key point here is not, as the glossy health mags would leave you to believe, outward appearance. Rather, something inside, a light that was once on has been extinguished. Still, in conversation, that light flickers. And we, in our manner and spirit, are young again. We have in that moment, changed.
Next: Running for Your Life: NYC Marathon
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