(no subject)
I am constantly trying to decide what "growing up" means; fervent sentimentalist warily eyeing each day as childhood's last. Growing up: growing sideways, actually. Growing up: remembering to flip the calendar page. Growing up: no longer being able to ignore the little horrors in others' lives, to believe their answers to "how are you?"
I spent childhood trying to classify things into workable diagrams, theories of everything to be utilized in living, vast, conspiracy-like symbolic networks, full of dichotomies and allegory: up and down to light and dark to good and evil, here is the womb the cave, here are the things you can't stop: death, end, finality--unlike beginning, it's all the same mythology, look at it logically, here's the solution. Developing moral systems was a constant obsession, pushing the definitions like some lawyer, where are the asymptotes, what are the lowest common denominators, how do you know the full set of possible decisions a human can need to make? But now (growing up?) I'm merely tired of the wear and tear reanalysis, of hours of conversations repeated with some tiny variation which illuminates some misplaced comma. I never liked editing; would sit down and write and turn it in or save, my glance at it only three years later.
When we were younger, everything was the cause of emotion, visceral, pure rays of electric feeling, truthful simplicity: a smile at Borrone's, pure glee, a slightly off comment, pure hurt. And yet now it feels as though we aren't even allowed our emotions, or at the very least that they must be complicated and humble. Who are we to care, to rant, to know? What kind of pain have we experienced? There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio. Why are you such an angsty, protected whiner, Horatio? (Is the subtext, in a way.)
("But he died!" "People do." "But he's dying!" "Everyone is." "But it's not fair!" "No one said it would be.")
But it's also an internal weariness, the build-up of a thousand minor disappointments, a million almosts, and far too many times I thought I got it right. The world seems built of tiny things, not the broad and sweeping happinesses we used to have, based on the appearance of strawberries at lunch or a new hello. The problem's that the big masterpiece is made up of a hundred mistakes and ugly marks. An Impressionistic nightmare. Van Gogh saw it too, they say.
Growing up is to be faced with all the things one cannot fight against, no sword, no treatise, not even a tsunami-relief fundraiser: disease, and death, and the failure of other people's love lives, and the general tendency of everyone else to grow up around you, sensible and mild and limited. The world is so strange . . . I'm sure, she said desperately, there must be some way to keep one's vivacity and love and happiness while faced with inevitable failures?
Or, as a stranger, give it welcome, Horatio.
I spent childhood trying to classify things into workable diagrams, theories of everything to be utilized in living, vast, conspiracy-like symbolic networks, full of dichotomies and allegory: up and down to light and dark to good and evil, here is the womb the cave, here are the things you can't stop: death, end, finality--unlike beginning, it's all the same mythology, look at it logically, here's the solution. Developing moral systems was a constant obsession, pushing the definitions like some lawyer, where are the asymptotes, what are the lowest common denominators, how do you know the full set of possible decisions a human can need to make? But now (growing up?) I'm merely tired of the wear and tear reanalysis, of hours of conversations repeated with some tiny variation which illuminates some misplaced comma. I never liked editing; would sit down and write and turn it in or save, my glance at it only three years later.
When we were younger, everything was the cause of emotion, visceral, pure rays of electric feeling, truthful simplicity: a smile at Borrone's, pure glee, a slightly off comment, pure hurt. And yet now it feels as though we aren't even allowed our emotions, or at the very least that they must be complicated and humble. Who are we to care, to rant, to know? What kind of pain have we experienced? There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio. Why are you such an angsty, protected whiner, Horatio? (Is the subtext, in a way.)
("But he died!" "People do." "But he's dying!" "Everyone is." "But it's not fair!" "No one said it would be.")
But it's also an internal weariness, the build-up of a thousand minor disappointments, a million almosts, and far too many times I thought I got it right. The world seems built of tiny things, not the broad and sweeping happinesses we used to have, based on the appearance of strawberries at lunch or a new hello. The problem's that the big masterpiece is made up of a hundred mistakes and ugly marks. An Impressionistic nightmare. Van Gogh saw it too, they say.
Growing up is to be faced with all the things one cannot fight against, no sword, no treatise, not even a tsunami-relief fundraiser: disease, and death, and the failure of other people's love lives, and the general tendency of everyone else to grow up around you, sensible and mild and limited. The world is so strange . . . I'm sure, she said desperately, there must be some way to keep one's vivacity and love and happiness while faced with inevitable failures?
Or, as a stranger, give it welcome, Horatio.