[Soundtrack for this post: Neil Young’s Harvest]
[Beer for this post: Goose Island’s India Pale Ale]
Old Man Look at My Life, I’m a Lot Like You Were
“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.”
The quotation above (which is not a “quote”) is something David Foster Wallace said in an interview in 1991 (which is discussed in a New Yorker article that can be found here). He killed himself when he was 46.
I had a -life crisis on my 19th birthday, but, apparently being more optimistic than Mr. Wallace, I called it my “quarterlife crisis.” And that’s partly what the crisis was about: it occurred to me that my life was likely at least one-quarter over—I didn’t have just a foot in the grave, I had a whole leg in there.
I turned 19 a few months after I started college. I was living in a dorm room with my friend Brian, who I had known all through high school. My birthday was midweek, if I recall, and going home was not an option. I was out at a class, or something, when my dad’s good friend Garn, who lived about 10 miles away, dropped off a cake at my dad’s request. The cake was a lovely gesture, and in the end probably made things better for me that day, but my heart sank when I saw that thing. It was an object I associated with celebration and being with friends and family. That object, absent the celebration, friends, and family, was depressing.
So that was part of it, the whole being-alone-and-away-from-home at a time when I really wanted to be home. I imagine this is a typical moment for freshmen who have gone away for school. But there was more to it—the cake and the feelings of aloneness were just the start. It got me thinking, and that’s when I realized I was much closer to death than I wanted to be. I was a very young man, in most ways still a boy, but my life was a quarter done. This was not a happy realization.
Recognizing my rapidly impending demise, I got to thinking about the ages and approximate remaining life years of those close to me. After ruminating for a few hours, lying awake in the middle of the night, I resolved to have all the kids I was going to have by the time I was 30.
I had my first child at 31, am currently 33, and will likely have another kid. So obviously I failed my 19 year-old self. But I still think I was right in a way. My thinking was something like this: at 19 I still had three of my four grandparents, two of whom lived to see me graduate from college, and one of whom made it to see me enroll in law school nearly eight years after my little crisis. I thought that was a good thing, and I figured if I wanted my parents to be around to see my children go to college, and for my children to really get to know my parents, I couldn’t put it off too long.
As it stands now, my dad will need to live to 79 (or so) to see Carver start college, my mom will need to make it to 76 (or so). These days, that’s certainly possible, but it’s also quite possible that they won’t. And if I have another kid, the odds become even longer.
And given that I’ve experienced what I find to be the extremely common sensation that time moves faster and faster as we get older, those days will be here before I know it.
I don’t think I ever came to a happy resolution to my crisis—I just managed to stop thinking about it.
“Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” – S. Beckett
. . . I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
One night [David Foster] Wallace met the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose depression memoir, Prozac Nation, had recently been published. She thought he looked scruffy — jeans and the bandanna — and very smart. Another night, Wallace walked her home from a restaurant, sat with her in her lobby, spent some time trying to talk his way upstairs. It charmed Wurtzel: "You know, he might have had this enormous brain, but at the end of the day, he still was a guy."
Wallace and Wurtzel didn't really talk about the personal experience they had in common — depression, a substance history, consultations at McLean — but about their profession, about what to do with fame. Wallace, again, had set impossible standards for himself. "It really disturbed him, the possibility that success could taint you," she recalls. "He was very interested in purity, in the idea of authenticity — the way some people are into the idea of being cool. He had keeping it real down to a science."
When Wallace wrote her, he was still curling through the same topic. "I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I'm not one of the good ones. But then I countenance the fact that at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don't notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself. It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am — so where does that put me?"
That’s from The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace, published in Rolling Stone.
The last paragraph is what I’m interested in (I thought the rest was necessary and interesting context). I’ve been trying to decide how much more I want to say—part of me wants to just say “Yeah, what he said.” But I guess I’ll draw it out.
For as long as I’ve been aware enough to think about it, I’ve found that I possess what strikes me as a strange blend of superiority (perceived) and humility. More than one person has told me that I initially came across as kind of a smug, arrogant bastard, but over time it became clear that I am actually nothing of the sort.
This blend that I am is odd, and hard for me to wrap my head around. I have little doubt that I am more honest, trustworthy, sincere, caring, considerate, well-rounded, and others-centered than most other people (note that me having “little doubt” doesn’t mean it is true). [n.1] But I also recognize that I am so loaded with faults and failings that the mere idea of beginning to list them is exhausting, and in whatever way I may be superior, there are also many ways in which I am hideously weak. Nevertheless, like Wallace, I think points are in order for recognizing my failings and caring about them.
What is probably at work here is the combination of my hatred of pride with the extremely high expectations I have for myself. I hold myself to a very high standard, one that I rarely meet, and I do not forgive failure. When it comes to me, I am entirely unforgiving. I have a list of the things that I most regret, and I will not forgive myself for them. Many of them are things I did as a child, most of which would seem like minor childhood indiscretions to most people, but they matter to me. One of my girlfriends and I used to argue about this, about how it wasn’t good to not forgive yourself. Since then people I have paid to tell me what’s wrong with me have suggested the same thing. But I still won’t do it. If I forgive myself it would be like conceding that those things were OK, that I could go ahead and forget them. But they weren’t OK, and I don’t want to forget them. I need the shame and self-loathing to remember to try to be better. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. That’s worth something, right? [n.2]
Note 1: I also believe very strongly that pride is an ugly vice, if not a sin, and therefore I work at not being proud of anything. So when I note these things it is only that I see them as matters of fact. I am not boasting.
Note 2: You may have noticed that the heading to this part of the post doesn’t really make much sense. But so what?
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