When he was in his early-20s, he hung a timeline above his desk. He had drawn it himself, meticulously, with a ruler and professional illustration pen. It spanned from 18 to 30, and he glue-sticked little pictures of his favorite authors next to the age at which they’d published their first novels. At 21, Bret Easton Ellis. At 24, Martin Amis. At 25, Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith. At 26, Philip Roth. At 27, John Updike. He cut out a picture of his own face, and stuck it to the timeline among them. Every year, on his birthday, he moved his face one spot forward. Every year, he passed another one of his idols.
All of the writers he admired were considered (at one time, at least) exceptional young writers, and he wanted nothing more than to be like them: an exceptional young writer. Writing a book, in and of itself, mattered less to him than doing it at a supernaturally young age. To be a prodigy, a wunderkind—that’s what aroused his ambitions. From the blurry vantage of Youth, failing to publish a novel before his 30th birthday would be his life’s ultimate failure.
And, ultimately, he failed. He turned 30, then 31, and had nowhere to stick his cut-out face.
To do a thing young is a shortcut to greatness. Everything you do right is evidence of your great potential, and all your mistakes are the mistakes of inexperience, which will be corrected, surely, by the passing of time. To write a poor sentence at the age of nineteen is expected (and quickly forgiven). To write a poor sentence at the age of forty-five—shouldn’t you know better by now? In this manner, being a not-young writer is a lose-lose proposition, because this principle applies to brilliant sentences, too. In youth, they are a marvel; later, they’re table stakes. Couples, which John Updike wrote when he was thirty-six, is considered one of his great accomplishments. But Villages, which he wrote at the age of seventy-two, is just as good. But of course it’s good—it was written by the guy who wrote Couples!
The years that pass eat up your margin for error until there is no margin left. The mistakes you make are no longer flaws of inexperience, they are flaws of character. To be young is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there, and suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with.
He managed to finish two novels before he turned twenty-five. Neither were published. Neither were “good”—they were a young person’s novels: overbearing, self-conscious, sloppy, prideful, subpar imitations of the kind of books exceptional young writers wrote. One of his unpublished novels was about a seven-year-old boy who writes an elaborate science-fiction thriller in his school notebook, and when the manuscript is discovered by his teacher, he is skipped ahead a grade, and there encounters all the familiar plot points you’d expect in a coming-of-age story: bullies, crushes, etc.
He never realized what a naked parallel that story was for his own ambitions: to be rewarded with advancement, not necessarily for the thing he did, but for how young he was when he did it. It wasn’t a specific accomplishment he’d invested all his pride and hope in, but a specific condition in which that accomplishment would be achieved.
And then, one day, that condition expired. He was no longer young, and therefore no longer a young writer, and therefore would never be an exceptional young writer.
But still, and yet, even so – contrary to all logic and in total disregard of quantum law – it remained his goal: to be a young writer, and to be discovered. The problem is: no one wants to discover a 45-year-old. 45-year-olds aren’t discovered, they’re uncovered, like toxic waste, or a political scandal, or the murderer at the end of an Agatha Christie book. My god, that 45-year-old was lurking among us this entire time!
(And the 55 year-olds are saying: forty-five? That’s nothing! Quit complaining! But one cannot choose the age at which they feel old, just like you can’t help feeling cold when the temperature drops. Winter comes whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. So do birthdays. Just ask Virginia Woolf, who, at the age of fifty, wrote in her diary: “I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated.”
Nine years later, Virginia walked into a pond with her pockets full of rocks, shuffling off her loose living randomness, permanently altering her aspect to the sun. Was this an act of optimism? Was this the response of someone eager to venture forth into the dark territory past the penumbra of youth?)
Post-Youth, he began reading books about The Second World War, and Ancient Greece, and the American Civil War, and Quantum Physics, and The History of The Universe, and took solace in the immensity of the world.
Why does one develop an interest in history later in life? Is it a dawning realization that we are stuck in our particular moment in time, forever to know only this one small sliver of history? It’s a bit like that with everything we experience: as the years pile on, we realize how narrowly we touch the world. Is that why retirees like to travel? These tour groups where old folks disembark slowly from buses – stair by stair, feet turned sideways – to explore ancient ruins for twenty minutes at a time? An attempt to cram in as much of the world as possible before it’s taken away from them?
In his youth, he vacationed differently. Everywhere he went was a place he could live, a potential future life. He could live here, he’d tell himself. Or he could meet a woman there, and start a family there, and become a citizen of that place. Mexico, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Western Indiana, etc.
Eventually, he met a woman and chose a place – the best woman and the best place – and his future was fixed. The world was good, but the world was no longer full of all these possibilities. What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived?
In Youth, you fantasize about one day meeting your idols. You imagine yourself standing behind them in line at a coffee shop, gathering the courage to tap them on the shoulder, tripping over your tongue to tell them what their work has meant to you. In these imagined scenarios you are always still young, still an up-and-comer, still undiscovered and hiding within you the potential for galactic greatness, but then you get old, and now must imagine yourself in line at Au Bon Pain, tearful and sputtering praise at Zadie Smith, who is, in fact, only three years older than you, and what a creepy interaction that would be! A 45 year-old, fawning like that—repulsive, pathetic!
That’s how it feels, most of the time, to no longer be young: pathetic, repulsive.
When you think of being young – when you think of Youth as a state of being – you might think about being twelve years-old and watching the opening credits of Silence of the Lambs on the VHS tape you bought secondhand at the video store with your allowance money. This might be a singular moment you’ve plucked from your brain (a specific time, a specific place) or perhaps a composite memory of all the times you watched Silence of the Lambs throughout your pre-teen and teenage years, when you were probably too young to be watching it at all.
In that opening sequence, which you’ve seen a million times, Clarice Starling is running through the woods at the FBI training camp. She’s wearing a gray jogging suit. It’s autumn, the image is washed out, the credits are in black typeface. Moody music plays.
In Youth, you watched this and felt hundreds of feelings, imagined hundreds of futures. Swimming within you were all the serial killer stories you’d one day write, that would be turned into movies just like this, and orbiting just outside the atmosphere of your comprehension (but still in view) were all the unknowable details of the grown-up world you’d one day inhabit, all the ambitious and slightly masculine women in jogging suits you might one day meet and perhaps marry. You experienced the opening credits of Silence of the Lambs in a manner that was completely unique to your position in the world, which was: you were young and could do anything.
But today, when you watch that same sequence – on the television in your hotel room during a work trip to Newark, let’s say – you might find it representative, instead, of all the serial killer stories you didn’t write, and you might be cowed by all the knowledge now within your grasp about how hard it is to write a story in the first place, and how much Thomas Harris – who wrote the novel the movie was based on – hated the process of writing, how torturous is was for him, how much he suffered in front of the keyboard, and you might fear that you share the same psychological trait, that you might never take joy in sitting at a desk, just a shadow of joy, just a foolish hope for future joy, just a lottery ticket with trillion-to-one odds of winning joy. You might even think about Ted Tally, the writer who adapted Harris’ novel, who won an Oscar for it, who never found much success after that, and you might wonder where he is now, what he’s doing, and you might be disappoined that you never got a chance to meet him, the guy who penned all those oft-quoted Hannibal Lecter lines (even though they’re less quoted, now, than they used to be—culture, too, loses its Youth). You might even feel melancholy about all the ambitious and slightly masculine women you didn’t meet, or who you met and failed to charm, who mistook your gestures of affection for mockery and were offended, who couldn’t see that you were more like them than they were willing to admit: slightly masculine, and ambitious.
Yes, you might watch the first five minutes of this particular movie and reminisce (fondly, even) about all your illusions about the grown-up world and how the grown-up world laughed as it shattered them.
He published a novel, eventually. It came out on his 37th birthday. Ten years later than Updike, thirteen later than Amis, fifteen later than Ellis. All debuts, by definition, feel like youthful acts, and so did his. But writing a book at thirty-seven earns you no extra credit—no one grades on a curve, no one is charmed by your precociousness. It was just another book written by a 37-year-old. A book that was not bad, maybe kinda okay, but definitely not great, because if it was great, why did it take him until he was thirty-seven to write it?
But it’s not just your own Youth that you mourn. You have kids, eventually, and must watch their Youth expire, too—slowly leaking out of them, day by day, relentlessly, invisibly, like a cracked tire, like a party balloon you find weeks later behind the couch.
You might cry inexplicably when you pass down their too-small snowsuits to neighbours. You might be irrationally angry when you find out that your spouse has donated to charity all the board books you once read at bedtime. You might attend your 4-year-old daughter’s ballet recital, and, sitting in the dark auditorium, watching all the little bodies fumble sweetly across the stage, find yourself suddenly overwhelmed by thoughts of all the things that will inevitably happen to those bodies – the good and bad things, the pain and elation, the self-disgust and attempts at self-refinement – and you might feel a deep and disorienting sadness, a throbbing bubble in your stomach, which is the inverse of the comfortable smallness you feel when you read books about The History of The Universe. It’s a feeling akin to dread, and the thing you’re dreading (you’ll realize) is this: that Youth exists only so that it can be destroyed.
Even as you celebrate the milestones of their personhood – as they walk, and talk, and read, and order meals at a restaurant, and bake banana loaf with hardly any help, and start writing down their secret thoughts in a journal you come across while putting away their laundry and can’t stop yourself from reading – you still want your kids to maintain their Youth for as long as possible, to believe in the Tooth Fairy, to be scared of ghosts, to love dinosaurs, to hold on to their innocence even though you know that the longer they hold on, the more it will hurt them to lose it. And they will lose it, you can’t stop it, just like you can’t stop their hair from growing or their hearts from being broken.
So you watch your kids closely. You watch them sleep. You watch them watching the opening credits of a movie they’re too young for and wonder what they’re imagining about the world, about themselves, about the silly dreams coalescing in their heads, and if, when they watch those opening credits again, decades from now – preferably anywhere but a hotel in Newark – they’ll mourn their Youth and the silly dreams it conjured.
But this silly desire to be an exceptional young writer wasn’t egoistic craving. It was a biological obligation. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t turn it off. Even when he tried not to write, he was writing. He imagined paragraphs in his head, imagined whole novels, composed of sentences that weren’t even made up of words, just the essence of words, just the gist of language, letter-like shapes and colors that were combined in his head to generate the possibility of something that could be written. He knew no other way to live, no other way to fully exist in the world. He’d lived inside the bodies of the writers he read, and imagined, too, that people were living inside of his. It was the only form of intimacy he could understand, the only one he could bear.
Wanting to be seen and understood and appreciated is not a desire unique to the young. You might think it is. You might think a lot of desires are unique to youth. You are told that getting older is a process of shedding desire, but that’s not true: you retain into old age a keen awareness of the decades stretched out before you, and you desire – with a bewildered sort of desperation – to make them count for something. Silly dreams are only silly when they don’t come true. And they don’t cease to be silly until they’re discarded.
Like everyone and everything, he was slowly stripped of his Youth (or set free of it, if you’re the glass-half-full type), and the endless possibilities that perhaps never existed were nonetheless narrowed down to just this one: to be the person he’d become, to move his cut-out face one spot forward, to live this life until there was no more of it to live.
Youth exists only so that it can be destroyed. Whew. This was a fascinating read. I wish younger me could have read it, say, every 10 years. I hope older me will do so.
Exquisite writing. Thank you. I just celebrated the milestone 70th birthday, causing this to resonate loudly within me. Although I loved the entire post, there were a couple of lines that stopped me in my tracks. "What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived?" "...you retain in old age a keen awareness of the decades stretched out before you, and you desire, with a bewildered sort of desperation, to make them count for something."