“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to young.”
“Yes! It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.”
Greer, Andrew Sean. Less: A Novel (except from p. 153).
I’m nowhere near fifty but that exchange struck me. Perhaps it’s the experience of turning a year older, supposedly being closer to the “real world” of “true adulthood”, concepts from which I never really found value or thought significant enough to acknowledge. But in the midst of a worldwide lockdown, it is here: another coming-of-age and I have realized that the liberation I had always longed for was to safely be a child. The idea, more than a month after my birthday, is still pristine raw, wrapped in plastic under artificial light. To that I mean: glaringly, almost-invisible.
Still like any cling-wrapped object or dark shadows, one can tell generally what the object is just by the silhouette.
“We’re too old to think we’ll meet again,” Less says.
(p. 157)
So perhaps, it’s more of this: it’s not my last day in a foreign country, but the time to book tickets and fly off to somewhere new—excitingly (to rename a more familiar feeling: one that starts with an a and rhymes with sobriety) uncertain—is coming to a close. Decisions have to be made; it is also forgivingly realistic to remember that the opportunities to do so become less and less as time passes.
From the exchange at the start of this post was one of the occasional “philosophically worthwhile” lines of this insufferable but strangely endearing Arthur Less. The novel is much like its titular character: halfway through the book now and I’ve lost count how many times I had wanted to stop reading out of frustration, and yet I can’t seem to put it down either.
Anyway, so I’m not at most social media sites anymore but I think I will forever be at Goodreads: