One difficulty: in those dim days our future seemed no further than the next weekend. Or our birthday. If we ever considered the future it was to believe we were going to beat the system and live for ever.
That was me, aged ten. Then I woke up about midnight in the antique stillness of my grandparents’ house. Emerging from a dream in which I lay in a grave with pedestrians passing by, not caring about my entombment. Me! The centre of the universe! (ie, the universe as I knew it). I think I cried.
Oddly, now death is much closer I’m less perturbed. I’d expect pedestrians to be unconcerned.
Occasionally I did think ahead, but in personal terms. Eventually I would have money and thus buy a bike. Whence, I knew not. But money would arrive, I’d be an adult and adults had money. It was the rule.
Adolescence forced me to blank out the future. Convinced I would never find favour in any young woman’s eyes. An unbearable nothingess. Greatly daring I whispered an invitation to a young woman I didn’t particularly like. And was told she would be washing her hair. To wit: “Drop dead”.
Youth ended when I decided to create a future: finding work in the USA. The project lasted a year and, somehow, I never doubted it would happen. When it did, acquaintances seemed astonished and envious. But why wasn’t I exhilarated when I stepped off the plane at Kennedy?
Simply, the future had become the present and the present is merely a string of tasks which need addressing.
Totally loved this, "the present is merely a string of tasks which need addressing." How true, we spend so much of life worrying about the future and regretting the past. But, now...is chewed up in the mundane. Great post! Sandi
ReplyDeleteParagraph two - that was me at age ten as well. The Church started pummeling me with salvation offers even earlier, but I didn’t need them - I was definitely not going to die. Now I know I’m going to die, but the meaning of death is unclear.
ReplyDeleteSandi/MikeM: For this post I asked myself the question: are there any exclusive benefits to old age, benefits not available to those who are younger. And I came up with one: to be able to view the past as a continuing and personally experienced panorama, to recognise phenomena changing slowly over decades, to see rises and falls that turn out to be part of the same development, to "know" for sure that much of life is cyclical.
ReplyDeleteIn short, the broader view. Added to this was the growth of my own "real" education, a million miles away from the rote stuff taught in schools, leading to decisions and perceptions I had arrived at wearily on my own. And to be able to modify and even discard these conclusions when further evidence revealed greater truths. Laboriously, I insist. Since I lacked the methods of learning and analysis I might have acquired had I gone to a good university.
Big stuff. Too big for my 300-word limit. So I fashioned the above snippets, knowing this would be a subject I'd return to. No big deal, of course. I am not alone in this. Others with more agile thought processes may have arrived there earlier even if a certain amount of time would have been necessary.
Sandi: Thanks for the compliment, much appreciated. Routine is a concept often sneered at. But it happens to all of us and we need to make it work for us.
MikeM: Two damascene moments that weren't in fact moments. That required time and an ability to make use of time. Forget distance (between us).
From the age of about 10 I wanted to join the police - don't know what brought on this wish. In those days there was a "cadet" entrance scheme and at the age of 16 I passed the written paper (easy for a grammar school boy). My form teacher at school berated me in a face to face for more than 20 minutes, His theme being that an educated person should not descend to the company of oafs (!) The more he talked the more certain I felt that I wanted to do this and get away from educational snobbery.
ReplyDeleteThe day for the medical arrived. I was fit and healthy, could expand my chest the required amount and was over the minimum stipulated height. (These things mattered in those regimented days - they seem to have been completely abandoned in the current police force). I did not expect any problems but I was failed for colour blindness, I had an unrealized "red/green" defection. (still have problems spotting cherries on the tree).
It was the end of my ambition and I decided never to have another - just go with the flow. Life did not treat me badly. I found a life-long love, married her and we had a pleasant family with grandchildren and great grandchildren later.
Jobs seemed to present themselves and I took them. My final and best one (for me) was the result of doing voluntary work and being asked to join the organisation professionally. I enjoyed my work and retired at 57 with an acceptable pension. After that I used experience gained to run my own small consultancy which was really pleasurable employment with good returns,
Looking back I would change nothing, My little boat survived life's rapids without conscious direction going with that flow.
Avus: Always astonished by "Wouldn't change anything". Whereas I stayed within journalism I contrived to make two almighty cock-ups - which I thoroughly regret - when choosing what I thought were upward steps. One of them cost me a couple of years in a desperate wilderness which was finally resolved not by me but by a senior boss who, almost accidentally, switched me to an editorship which proved to be the dream job of my whole career. I got myself into this earlier tangle tempted by greed (the pay was good) and a misjudgement of my adaptability (the subject matter of the magazine required a deeper understanding than I had airily imagined). The boss's intervention was so condign yet so unexpected that I may have believed in the existence of a beneficent Jahweh for a few seconds.
DeleteThe other occasion, in the USA, played out as pure farce yet could have had serious consequence. I was flattered when two managers from a publishing company near Chicago, having heard what a bright boy I was, flew to Pittsburgh where I was then working, took me and VR out to dinner, offered me bigger bucks and a position well within my competence. I started on a Monday and eagerly resigned the following Thursday. Why? First I was told to get my hair cut; thereafter things on the non-journalistic side got steadily worse. Like finding I had to do national service all over again but this time in the Army. There I was jobless, back in Pittsbugh, when my former employer (a stern right winger with dubious tendencies during WW2) offered me my old job back again, and, even more mysteriously, upped my salary by a thousand bucks. Had this not happened I might well have struggled.
Can't say I was a flow man. Journalism always demanded carpe diem although it's ironic that the best move in my working life was initiated by someone else. However it's just occurred to me I did later compensate the Pittburgh boss for his decision by solving a book publishing problem that had hung doomily over his head for several years and which no one else in the company could have tackled.
Boastful? Perhaps, but with an admixture of stupidity.
Retrospection is inevitable, I suppose, but it’s not exceptionally useful, isn’t meant to be. I have noticed that with advancing years my dreams of childhood are more frequent, yet only when asleep. I have no waves of nostalgia washing over me during my waking hours. I can think back on things I might have done differently, but I don’t permit myself the luxury of regret. To what end? As for death, I never give it a moment’s thought. It will happen in its own good time and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it - nor want to.
ReplyDeleteDMG: I'm not sure that retrospection covers what I was trying to say. Rather the growing realisation that I had, willy nilly, acquired the intellectual wherewithal to become a part-time (if unpaid) historian. That the passage of time had caused fragmentary if well-remembered events to cohere, and that - thereby - I was better equipped to understand the present.
DeleteIs regret a luxury? Only if it incapacitates, I think.
One problem about looking back is the difficulty of re-creating the mindset of the time. Otherwise our judgements are today's and not yesterday's. Yes, perspective is achieved but contemporary fear, revelation, joy and disappointment are lost. A good example: at the time of the Suez debacle I was on the wrong side of the world and wondering how I might get back to Dear Old Blighty. Self-centred you might say. Now, with history apparently repeating itself, I am predominantly sad.
Serious fiction encourages me to give more than a moment's thought to death. Take Julien in Le Rouge et Le Noir; seemingly a pretentious fathead yet he dies gracefully. It's unexpected and yet - I don't quite know how - it seems possible. It's not that I'm looking to modify death's experience but I confess to be interested in myself and Julien makes me wonder. Daydreaming, perhaps. Often thought to be a waste of time but you never know when it may find application..
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"Antique stillness" perfectly describes a grandparents house, at least back in the old days. I wish I was able to hear my own grandchildren's thoughts about my house.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting how important your time in the U.S. was for your personal development. I think that may be true for anyone who leaves the comfort of the known for the hardscrabble reality of beginning over, someplace where you know no one. But in another country it must have really been something.
:Colette: My reasons for wanting to work in the USA were both various and complex. To do them justice would probably take about 1000 words. I was, however, reasonably well prepared: I'd read many US novels, covering perhaps fifty years. I'd watched movies and TV with my sociological eyes open, followed the country's politics, probably knew more about US academic life than its equivalent in the UK.
DeleteThe shared language was and is, however, a snare and a delusion. It disguises a "foreign" culture. This became apparent when I moved out of the Y into an apartment in Dormont, a suburb about three miles from the centre. Compared with London, where nobody gives a damn about even the next-door neighbours, Dormont was more like a dispersed family. Funnily enough the adults were comparatively timid, it was the kids who drew closer. Since one of my aims was to gain a greater understanding of baseball I bought myself a glove and played scratch ball in exchange for telling the kids what little I knew about The Beatles.
The workplace was much more alien. It was, nominally, a publishing company yet no one doing journalism had any kid of journalistic background. Working on magazines for them was merely a job, hardly to be distinguished from serving in a hardware store, though perhaps better paid. In fact it wasn't me "beginning over" but rather my workmates.
I was used to the company of journalists and, at twenty-five, I had ten years of newspaper and mgazines behind me. When it was decided to include a profile of the company's owner in one of the magazines I was automatically given the job of interviewing him and writing the piece. Later I was asked if I cared to take over publishing a technical book about control valves - a project that had languished for several years - I wrapped it up in two or three months. Everyone was astonished and I was rewarded with a trip to California to check out the final draft with the author. Accompanied by VR at no cost to me. Plus the free rental of a Dodge Charger.
Everyone had had a better - certainly longer - formal education than I had but I found myself having to rein back on my vocabulary. And what I knew about literary US. Yet back in the UK I was merely a hack, one among many. As you can imagine I took full advantage of my awe-inspiring status and went on to rather more demanding jobs. Had you known me then there's a good chance you would have found me insufferable.
It may have been the Pittsburgh suburbs were culturally backward but I hardly deserved this treatment. I returned to the UK after six years, no doubt bumptiously confident. Became an editor within a couple of years. "Not knowing anyone" (your phrase) in the US was no disadvantage at all. Very quickly I'd learnt to take the conversational initiative and this was to prove a useful skill when I developed closer relations with France where we bought a a second house.
I fear I've gone on a bit.
It is all so very interesting.
DeleteBeautiful blog
ReplyDelete