Forty-Three

Birthdays, fancy robes, cleaning the kitchen, failing my kids, and how a book by the most famous writer in the world brought me here.

Sep 23, 2022

IT’S MY BIRTHDAY. I’ve turned 43.

No longer young, not quite old—somewhere in between.

Some nights, I wear a pair of Spider-Man pyjamas to bed. Not ironically, either. I like them—they’re light, loose-fitting, and soft the way cheap cotton gets soft after a few hundred washes. Other nights, I wear a two-hundred-dollar designer robe that my wife bought me after we wore some at a high-end vacation property in Mont Tremblant.

I recently watched the 1930 version of All Quiet on The Western Front, an epic and technically impressive antiwar film released just three years after sound was introduced into movies. As soon as it was over, I put on Terminator 2: Judgment Day, an epic and technically impressive pro-cyborg film made in 1991, and, just like when I was twelve, I couldn’t stop thinking about how cool it would be to have a portable computer that could hack into a bank machine so I could spend the day playing After Burner at the arcade.

A few weeks before that, on a hot summer day that reminded me of the hot summer days I spent wandering the suburbs, I bought a Coke slush at a gas station and drank it on a park bench while reading the latest issue of Detective Comics. Later that night, I poured myself a glass of Amaro Nonino, a fragrant Italian liqueur that goes for sixty-five dollars a bottle, and sipped it while reading Kōbō Abe’s 1964 surrealist novel The Face of Another (in my fancy robe).

Am I pretending to be a kid, or pretending to be an adult?

It often feels like I’m doing a poor job of both.

Why Am I Here?

THIS IS THE QUESTION that all of literature and philosophy and religion since the beginning of human thought has reckoned with. And it’s a tough one, because there’s no answer. Why are you here? You’re here because you’re here. That’s it. Like Milan Kundera writes in The Art of the Novel:

“We are born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die.”

Whatever your race or gender or financial status, no matter how much you’ve failed or succeeded, how much you’ve triumphed or suffered, you probably feel burdened by this ineffable idea: that life – your life, in particular – is hard to live. And that’s because it is. The basic fact that you exist is a violation of your autonomy. No one chooses where, to whom, or in what age of history they are born. By a roll of the dice, you simply arrive. I happened to be born male, in a Western country, during an epoch of wealth and healthiness unlike any the civilized world has ever seen, and while I’d very much like to credit my talent and virtuous discipline for the comfortable life I enjoy, it’s actually just dumb luck.

The Interstellar Kitchen

WHY AM I HERE? The answer to this question often seems to be: to clean the kitchen.

I would guess that I spend approximately 25-percent of my waking hours in the kitchen, cooking and/or cleaning. My wife and I are generally allergic to letting dishes sit on the counter for any period longer than thirty seconds. Like all ironclad political beliefs, this one requires great sacrifice: specifically, that we are never not cleaning the kitchen.

It gets cleaned after breakfast, which means, since we all eat breakfast at different times, that it gets cleaned three times each morning. Then it’s cleaned twice again after lunch(es), then again after dinner, which is always the main event.

The kitchen takes hours to clean, yet mere minutes to make dirty. This would seem to break several laws of relativity. Our kitchen is like the ocean planet Matthew McConaughey visits in the movie Interstellar, where, for every few minutes he spends on the surface, years pass in the orbiting spaceship above, and when he finally makes it back, he finds that his crewmates have grey hair and his children have grown up and had children of their own. That’s kind how it feels, each time I finish cleaning the kitchen: like I’ve missed my kids’ entire childhoods.

All those families who juggle evening activities with homework and meal preparation and baths and bedtime routines—I cannot fathom what sacrifices they make to enable it. We eat at 6:00 pm, and the kitchen is never clean before 7:00 pm. The kids go to bed around 8:00 pm (but, let’s face it, usually later), which means that the few evening hours I’m with them I’m not actually with them, simply near them, engaged in my mindless domestic calisthenics, scraping food into the compost, rinsing/arranging dishes in the dishwasher, wiping down tables and counters, sweeping up crumbs, sealing leftovers in their little glass chambers. The kids entertain themselves while I do this, often by standing at the counter, three feet away, incessantly asking when I’ll be done. Which means I’m not just ignoring them, I’m ignoring them and barking at them to leave me alone. They could go off and play, but they stay nearby because they want to be close to me, they want me to play with them, they’re waiting for that moment when I’ll slam shut the dishwasher and lean the broom against the wall and finally be finished.

[How quickly we forget how much of childhood is waiting for your parents to be done whatever they’re doing.]

To allay my guilt, I’ve recruited the kids. Now they’re cleaning the kitchen, too. And they seem to love it. Genuinely. They squabble over who gets to scrub the pans (they’ve gotten really good at scrubbing pans). It feels like a pyrrhic victory, though. All I can think is, my god, other kids are outside right now, playing soccer, playing baseball, practicing piano, doing algebra (for fun, probably)—other kids are spending their evenings learning the essential skills upon which their future successes will be built. And what are my kids learning? How to scrape crusted egg off the edge of a skillet? I’m training my daughter to be a housewife. I’m training my son for a career in the dish pit of a restaurant. I’m ruining their lives so that my life, in the immediate present, can be fractionally more convenient.

This is a good example of what it’s like to be a parent: to live in a perpetual state of guilt about how you’re failing your children. And when you’re not failing them, you’re doing something even worse: making them just like you.

The Good-Enough Parent

BUT IT TURNS OUT you’re supposed to fail your kids.

“Someone once asked [British paediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott] to lay out the responsibilities of a father to his children. Winnicott replied that there are only two. One is to stay alive long enough to get your kids on their feet; and the second is to fail them, because failure, for a parent, is inevitable. A parent’s failures are what drives their offspring to try harder, to do better, to figure things out more, and also what drives them to leave their parents and start their own lives and careers and even families. The only trick, Winnicott added, is to fail your children naturally, to enact the inevitable slow decline, to become less and less capable and interesting and compelling, so that they can leave you, and “fail”—if that is what we insist on calling it—on their own.”

Books Will Find You

THAT QUOTE ABOUT WINNICOTT comes from Sixty, a book by Ian Brown, which is a diary of the year following his sixtieth birthday. It found me a few months ago as I was passing through the basement of Black Squirrel Books, on my way back from the bathroom. It was hidden in a stack of paperbacks, but the spine stood out to me—bold letters, bold colours, bold art-deco patterns. I recognized Ian Brown’s name because I was once a religious viewer of Hot Type, the erstwhile literary talk show where he was a regular panelist alongside Antanas Sileika and Jeanie Macfarlane.

[Brown, Sileika, Macfarlane—they all seemed like literary icons to me, the CanLit counterparts of Vidal, Bloom, and Kakutani. A couple decades ago, when I won a scholarship to attend the summer program at Humber School for Writers, Antanas Sileika — at the time the school’s director — called to give me the good news, and I might as well have been getting a phone call from the Prime Minister, or The Pope.]

So I was compelled to pick up the book and leaf through it. The prose was smooth, smart, self-flagellating—like Geoff Dyer, but slightly less British (ie. slightly more Canadian). On the third page, Brown mentions making a mate. I’d just been in Argentina, where mate is ubiquitous, and had brought home a mate cup and parilla and sipped the stuff regularly. A few pages later, Brown waxes rhapsodic about Knaussgard—another habit we share, another secret signal sent and received.

[What is it about Karl Ove that activates this fanboy adoration in the male writer’s mind? Because he’s found a way to make emotional vulnerability hyper-masculine? Because he makes domestic life seem tragically heroic? He’s so unhappy, why do we all want to be like him?]

I couldn’t ignore all this synchronicity. This book wanted to be bought, so I bought it, even though I’d promised my wife I’d stop buying books, even though there was already a pile of twenty books on my desk that I was meaning to read. For a while, Sixty sat in that pile, but, in the weeks leading up to my birthday, it seemed like the perfect book to close out my forty-second year. And it was.

I suppose it’s not surprising that the anxieties, frustrations, and regrets of a sixty-year-old are the same as those an almost-forty-three-year-old. We’re both male, white, straight, and living in Canada. We’re both writers. We’re in the same economic league, living a sort of stripped-down version of an upscale life (one in which you can casually mention that you just returned from Argentina, or, as Brown does in Sixty, fret about money problems while on vacation in Italy, England, Colorado). If you do the terrible math, I’m closer in age to sixty than I am to a twenty-five.

“The redeeming trait of old age—or of aging into old age, as the gerontologists put it—is that finally, you can begin to look at the unlived life and appreciate that it is still life. If you take the trouble to write down the details, paying attention to the truth, and not the official version, you get a second chance to live it. That is the real discipline of getting older: to force myself to pay attention to the details, as if they still matter.”

His writing indeed has a Knaussgardian quality: it brings you into the home, into the marriage, into the kitchen (which is always being cleaned, even in these works of high literature), and makes the mundanity of it feel cosmically important. His life is hard to live, simply because it’s his own, and the only one he’ll ever have.

I’m not sixty — not even close — but this was the exact right book to read at the exact right time. All because I had to pee while I was having coffee at a used bookstore.

I feel lucky that it found me.

Nobels, No-Hitters, and Posthumous Pulitzers

There is an incredible website where you can find out all the things other people accomplished when they were your age. This website is called Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age. Here are some notable things that 43 year-olds have done:

Marie Curie won her second Nobel prize, for the isolation of pure radium.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the youngest man elected to the United States presidency.
Soviet cosmonaut Georgy Timofeyevich Beregovoi was the oldest man ever to join the cosmonaut corps.
Baseball player Nolan Ryan pitched the sixth no-hitter of his career.
Isabel Peron, a former professional dancer, became the first female chief of state in the Americas when she took over as President of Argentina.
John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, A Confederacy of Dunces.

But that last one is a theoretical accomplishment: John Kennedy Toole would have been 43 when A Confederacy of Dunces won The Pulitzer Prize, but he wasn’t, because he killed himself twelve years earlier, at the age of 31.

Why Am I Really Here?

IT’S NOT ENTIRELY TRUE that I’m here because of dumb luck.

In the late 1800s, Leo Tolstoy — at the time the most famous writer in the world — learned about a peculiar sect of radical Christians living at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains in Western Russia. They rejected traditional Church orthodoxy, they refused to join the military, and so, of course, the Russian state was attempting to purge them. They were forcibly conscripted, exiled from their homes, starved to death. Still, they resisted. They burned their guns in a bonfire. They refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the emperor.

These were Tolstoy’s kind of people—stubborn, virtuous. He had long believed the peasantry was the most noble class, and, despite his wealth and notoriety, he spent much of his later life trying to live like one (he exclusively wore a kosovorotka, the traditional Russian peasant shirt, which is now referred to as a tolstovka, which means, literally, “Tolstoy shirt”). He described this sect of anarcho-pacificist farmers as “the people of the 25th century.” But they called themselves by a different name: The Doukhobors.

When it became clear that there was no reconciling the Doukhobor’s ideological stance with the Russian State, a deal was struck: they would be allowed to leave the country. The conditions were that (1) they had to pay their own way, and (2) they could never return. But where to go? Europe was pretty full at this point in history, and the neighbouring regions weren’t keen to receive immigrants (are they ever?). Luckily for the Doukhobors, a gigantic country on the far side of the ocean had recently been confederated. This country was willing to offer land grants to persecuted minorities—if they could find a way to get there.

So Leo Tolstoy – now 71 years-old – pulled an old manuscript out of his drawer. He’d abandoned it ten years earlier. It was called The Konevskaya Story. As he rushed to finish it, a better (and slightly more meta) title occurred to him.

Resurrection turned out to be a massive hit, the biggest of Leo Tolstoy’s career. It outsold Anna Karenina and War and Peace, and the royalties he received were used exclusively to send the Doukhobors to Canada (this, back when you could actually make money writing a book). And so, in 1898, more than 7500 Doukhobors sailed across the Atlantic. It was the largest mass immigration in Canadian history. And looking over the railing of one of those ships were my great-great-grandparents.

So: why am I here? Because of a novel written by Leo Tolstoy. A book is the reason I was born in this country and not on the grassy steppes of Western Russia. A book is why I’m here in Western Quebec wearing Spider-Man pyjamas, sipping Amaro Nonino, complaining about cleaning the kitchen, and not somewhere on the Crimean peninsula complaining about my kitchen being destroyed by Russian missile attacks.

Life is hard, no matter who you are, no matter where you are, but sometimes books will find you, and sometimes they’ll will bring you to different places.

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