My Neck, My Back

In about 2012 I was at university studying English Literature and Philosophy. I didn’t do a lot of the reading, but I did get through both Exit Ghost and The Human Stain by Philip Roth. I don’t know whether I was primed to dislike Roth or I managed it completely naturally. From the start I found him self-pitying and uninteresting. The Nathan Zuckerman books are somewhere between partially- and wholly-autobiographical. They are about an aging author who now teaches at an elite university and spends his time embroiled in affairs with students, cancel culture, disputes about intellectualism and morality. As the books continue, Zuckerman ages with them. He suffers from incontinence. His body is breaking down but he still wants to fuck. I found all of this contemptible. Not just politically - the whining of the New York intelligentsia at being cancelled by students, the (even now) risible ‘twist’ that the cancelled professor is revealed to be a light-skinned black man all along. Take that! On a purely human level I found it completely uninteresting. 

The reason I say I might have been primed to dislike Roth is he was already contemporary literary royalty. He was assigned reading on two separate modules after all. I was aware that he operated in the same kind of elite literary fiction circles that would later make Jonathan Franzen the kind of person you could dismiss in a way that indicated you liked proper literature. But even then, I don’t think I was prepared for quite how out-of-touch, how self-satisfied, how whiny it all was. Is this great literature? It’s not even got any goblins in it! It’s just English professors writing books about having sex their students!

(I also read Disgrace by JM Coetzee around this time, a story with a similar conceit but which is immeasurably more nasty, unpleasant, condemnatory. Here, at least, was an author with the proper levels of self-loathing). 

The reason I find myself thinking about Philip Roth is that of late I can’t stop thinking about getting older. I am not yet incontinent and I have no students to seduce. Neither am I meaningfully old. But I do feel a certain acceleration in the whole process. It seems natural - reasonable, even! - to think that we should age at a generally proportionate rate. If my dad goes to bed at 8pm, and I go to bed at midnight, it should take me exactly 38 years to traverse that period of sleepiness. I am 34: I should fall asleep at 11:03. That it doesn’t work like this is obvious, but still it feels that Father Time has crashed into me recently and I wasn’t ready at all. 

I have to declare a privilege. As I work abroad from my laptop, I am constantly running into younger people. Sometimes to save money I stay in hostels and tell myself I will take the opportunity to be sociable. But I’m not sociable. What I am is friendly. I am open and cheerful and speak when spoken to. But when it comes to actually joining in with anything, making a friend who lasts more than two bottles of beer, participating, I find that I simply can’t be fucked. 

It would be flattering to call this a natural process. A gentle drift, a conscious uncoupling with youth, like sinking into a warm bath while several houseflies tried to get out through a closed window. I would love to say that I think kind thoughts about all of it. But I don’t. I think horrible, evil, nasty thoughts. I see groups who I decide not to try and be friends with, I see their undercuts and their mullets and their ASOS shoulder bags, their clear-framed glasses, their tote bags, their evident lust for life, and that horrible little incipient old person thinks, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. 

Another privilege (I hope all of these privileges are outweighed by how profoundly unflattering the rest of this is): by pure good fortune I’ve managed to look much younger than I am. It isn’t even that if I inveigled my way into the social group that I’d obviously be that horrible meme about the middle-aged woman at the party. People would be welcoming even if they could see my couple of grey hairs, lost beneath the bleach. Nobody has ever accused me of being old. There is no justification for the ugliness and the contempt that I feel. I’m simply a bitter person. 

If I was really desperate to make this feel less like bitterness and more justified, I’d say that life experiences make people interesting and young people (myself once included) generally lack them. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just the passage of time. I find the jittery uncertainty, the peacocking, the brittle confidence and in-jokes, all things that I was once, quite maddening now. I like being friends with people in their 30s because there is a certain self-confidence that comes with it. Spending too much time around people much younger than me is like replaying a video game level I’ve already finished. Ah look they missed the loot drop. If you wait here for 5 minutes the guard comes past and you can cut his throat. You’ll figure it out. 

But the thing I’m working my around to is that this is all so fucking tedious. It was tedious to read when I was 21 and working my way through Philip Roth, and it’s tedious to read now. In some senses it is one of the most tedious topics in human history. Birth, sex, death. Nothing new can be said about them any more, though God knows we try. The tedium of talking about it is a tedium inherited from our ancestors. Being bored by older people complaining is an essential human experience. It would be nice to think that listening to it today earns you the right to complain tomorrow, but nobody wants to fucking listen to it today. As Abe Simpson says, “It’ll happen to you!”. 

Ask me what the real problem is (other than being awful, bitter, old, misanthropic, etc, etc etc) and it’s probably just that I’m a bit lonely. When I lived at home and had a regular set of friends, I don’t think I felt like this. Really I’m just reaping the consequences of trying to turn into a backpacker at the age of 34. Well, look: I’d have done it earlier if I could. I’m chasing lost time. I couldn’t afford it when I was young enough to be one of the young people here. I’m in my own personal sprint to experience as much as possible before I die, and hopefully I live forever. Right now that puts me in a social circle that’s almost entirely gap years (unless I go to a co-working space to meet some Digital Nomads and exchange LinkedIn details, but I’d rather shove my hand into a mincing machine). 

Oh well boo hoo, be lonely while you sit with your laptop in the sun. It’s the choice I made. Better to navel gaze about it than actually be depressed I suppose. Philip Roth, I apologise. The urge to be maudlin and self-pitying about a comfortable life is unshakeable. I can’t wait to see how unbearable I am by the time I actually have something to complain about. It’s going to break records.