the ways we miss our life are life
Posted by Gordon on January 8, 2011
Richard Ford set Independence Day, his second novel, after The Sportswriter, about Frank Bascombe, in the US summer of 1988 during the election campaign later won by George Bush senior. It won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. Some think his more recent Lay of the Land – same guy, ten years later – an even greater achievement.
“A sad fact about adult life of course is that you see the very things you’ll never adapt to coming towards you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are , you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you’ll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don’t. You can’t. Somehow it’s already too late. And maybe its even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, though we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it’s too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: “The ways we miss our lives are life.” [p5]
I’m briefly bemused by Joe’s belief that I’m a man who believes that life’s leading someplace. I have thought that way other times in life, but one of the fundamental easements of the Existence Period is not letting whether it is or whether it isn’t worry you–as loony as that might be. [49]
All of a long passage from bottom of 94:
Feeling of ‘bright synchronicity’ re ‘hopeful activities’ which were what life was about, balanced by “a sensation that everything I contemplated was limited or at least underwritten by ‘the plain fact of my existence’” …”that everything I might do had to be weighed against the weight of the practical ..”
“I now think of this balancing of urgent forces as having begun the Existence Period, the high wire act of normalcy .. the time in life where everything that was going to affect us later actually affects us, a period when we go along more or less self-directed and happy, though we might not choose to mention it or even remember it later were we to tell the story of our lives, ..
“Certain crucial jettisonings seemed necessary for this passage to be a success … Most people once they reach a certain age troop through their days struggling like hell with the concept of completeness, keeping up with all the things that were ever part of them, as a way of maintaining the illusion that they bring themselves fully to life. [... examples]
“Most of these you just have to give up on, along with the whole idea of completeness, since after a while you get so fouled up with all you did and surrendered to and failed at and fought and didn’t like, that you can’t make any progress. Another way of saying this is that when you are young, your opponent is the future; but when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything you’ve done in it and the problem of getting away from it.”
p 226 “And it can be paralyzing to think an insignificant decision, a switch thrown this way, not that, could make many things turnout better, even be saved. (My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything–a marriage, a conversation, a government–as being different from how it is, a trait that might make a top notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being).
[p439] The strongest feeling I have now when I pass along these streets and lanes and drives and ways and places for my usual reasons … is that holding the line on the life we promised ourselves in the Sixties is getting hard as hell. We want to feel our community as a fixed, continuous entity, the way Irv said, as being anchored into the rock of permanence; but we know it’s not, that in fact beneath the surface (or rankly all over the surface) it’s anything but. We and it are anchored to contingency like a bottle on a wave, seeking a quiet eddy. the very effort of maintaining can pull you under.
