Grey Tickles, Black Pressure

In 2012 I was at university in York 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 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 human level I simply found it uninteresting. 

The reason I say I might have been primed to dislike Roth is that 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 an iconoclastic way, as long as you were in company who knew who Jonathan Franzen was. 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 with 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 an 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. But I've learned the lesson that I ignored when I was told it by someone older than me. We don't age gradually. There are years in our life where decades seem to pass. 

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 often 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 the warm bath of middle adulthood. I would love to say that I think kind thoughts about all of it. But I don’t. Sometimes I think horrible, evil, nasty thoughts. I see groups who I decide not to try and be friends with, people enjoying themselves unburdened by whatever I’ve got going on, and that horrible little incipient old person thinks, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. 

I usually write pieces for this blog in a single sitting. I edit, I publish. This one - as I insert a new paragraph, several weeks later - is taking a while. It's because I have developed an unhealthy habit of swinging between periods of contentment and cheerfulness - usually after meeting nice people - and ones of self-loathing and bitterness. I don't want to appear like I'm always bitter, whatever my commitment to oversharing. But it's true to say that I am bitter at least some of the time. 

I'm not used to being so bipolar - to use the word loosely. There was a brief period of my thirties where I felt secure and like I had developed self-knowledge. I suppose I still have that, but the self-knowledge is becoming increasingly self-lacerating. Maybe there's a kind of Dunning-Kruger emotional sweet spot. Maybe I'm in it right now. I will be wiser than this in the future, but I feel my insulating ignorance falling away too. 

Let me try and make a case that I'm not completely beyond saving. 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 that the jittery uncertainty, the peacocking, the brittle confidence and in-jokes, all things that I was once, can be maddening. I like being friends with people in their 30s because there is a self-confidence that comes with it. Spending too much time around people much younger than me can be 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. 

Other times I meet people who are younger but so charismatic and switched-on that I know I'd have been terrified of them had I met them when I was a moron. All that this really amounts to is crashing, tectonic self-regard. My judgments of others start from my own insecurity. Their qualities are admirable or not relative to my own weakness at any given moment. Maybe that was always the case.  

Ultimately 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. 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[1]. 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 ages beginning with '2' (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. 

[1] Actually I could have afforded it, that's the really annoying thing. My outgoings right now are substantially less than when I lived in Manchester and worked as a librarian on about 25k a year. Annoying but true. I am not a wealthy man, though I am lucky that I was able to walk away from everything, which is a privilege of its own. And if I ended up completely destitute I'm sure my parents could open up the spare room and send the cost of the flight. So it goes. One of my major insecurities is that I share photos of myself on some beach somewhere and people assume I've managed it through some kind of sleight-of-hand or nepo greasing. And to an extent I have, because my parents joined the middle class some time in the late 00s and I carry all of the attendant benefits, but I did also do this myself. Sometimes you can just do things. Unless you have a mortgage and a stable, fulfilling family life. I'm afraid you're simply going to have to take the L on that one.