You have to please excuse me and perhaps indulge me in some spring whining. The gist of it every year is that I feel old. Oh the many signs are there. And indeed it's a spring time ritual of mine to list them. This year is especially hard though: alas the effects of the accumulating years has finally seeped into my reading life where I thought I could forever be young.
Big shock I was not ready for: I have read a memoir, a MEMOIR!, written by someone approximately my age. Here I am thinking my life hasn't really begun, and someone has written a memoir about our generation. The someone happens to be Sloane Crosley. The book is called: I was told there'd be cake. And okay, she's actually a bit older than me and the book is excellent... but still. Perhaps growing old means finding an increasing number of new novels that allude to times and events that one has lived through. One day, the Philip Roths of our generation will pop out, every few years, books about coming of age with too many possibilities, no marketable skills, and the facebook.
And no longer deniable: I accept that there are a finite number of books I can read in my lifetime. Seems so obvious to me now, but even five years ago, I didn't really believe I won't get to read everything. Before you consider me totally silly, ask yourself this: when you were in fifth grade, did you think you can be done with reading? Did you even think you will make it to the 30 minute mark assigned to you to read? I know the logic is pretty clear. Human beings are mortals; mortals can only read a finite number of books; I am a human being; ergo, I can only read a finite number of books. A young heart, however, is not ready to accept certain logical conclusion. So it makes me feel really sad (and old) that I accept I will one day read my last page.
And there you have it. Maybe a life is a sum of pages read: You accumulate the pages and then you die. I better choose wisely.
5 comments:
And in the U.S. alone well over 100,000 new books are published every year. You'd have to read a book every five minutes just to keep up, taking no breaks to eat or sleep. Not only will you never read all the books out there, there will be more books you haven't read when you die than there were when you were born.
Which I guess that to preserve hope we should measure the success of our reading in terms of quality, not quantity.
Yikes that's a lot of books bry, but remember that people don't necessarily want to read everything published. For example, I doubt I will want to read Joe-the-plumber's memoir in my lifetime. I should really clarify and say what was shocking for me was the realization that I won't be able to read everything I *want* to read in my lifetime.
I was going to readily agree with you re. quality vs. quantity, but it's giving me a pause. Let me think about that and get back to you.
So where is that book about our generation, about too many possibilities and too little in reality? And about facebook as the confidant of our petty vanities and glories? Why haven't I seen that story yet? Or have I, and it just wasn't all that?
We're going to see some exciting times, though, if we care to. But we've heard about it all already--we contain problems in far off worlds and ignore our own. Development and population growth is unsustainable but we can't speak out against it (not in a way that resonates). We're all objectified and insecure but still addicted anyway. But will it reach a crisis point when we can get properly excited? And what to do, in the mean time?
Time keeps dragging us on, unceasingly... doesn't matter if we've felt as in love as a person possibly could--the credits don't roll, we get washed out in time. It exists apart from us: constant, mechanical time, ticking and ticking and...
Mickey, no, that book doesn't exist yet. i think our generation is still too unripe despite my whining about getting old. Maybe you will write that book; then you might be remembered:
"It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark."
From "The Secret Scripture" by Sabastian Barry.
(just started reading this book, but it's promising!).
I'm just reading Sebastian Barry too! How funny. I'm reading The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty. The style is beautiful isn't it?
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