If The Way of All Flesh is the great epic of young adulthood, then, Biswas is a tale for those experiencing the first intimations of middle age.
Except, of course, for the fact that Butler wrote Flesh when he was a middle-aged man, having never won his own quest for autonomy, looking back and imaging what such a victory might be like for a person in his young adulthood. And Biswas -- that great testament of disappointed middle age -- was penned by a man in his mid-to-late twenties, gazing with pessimism toward the future. Distressingly -- I emphasize the point -- Naipaul was not indeed much older than oneself when he turned out this magisterial work. (In fact -- it pains me to extract this truth -- he was 29 when it was published, and thus probably younger than me when he began work on it). The positions of the authors are swapped, then, with respect to the life stages they so famously chronicled.
In other words, both books are fantasies, written without direct experience. How then could they have done it?, one thinks. How could they have known, without being there themselves?
But then, one reflects, one doesn't actually turn to these books when one is there oneself, but when one is fantasizing about being there, and this perhaps solves the mystery. I didn't feel possessed to read The Way of All Flesh at age 25 because -- like Ernest Pontifex at the end of the book -- I had actually achieved financial and emotional independence from my parents. I read it because I still coveted such a state. (Which is a reflection merely of the universal drama of the human life cycle -- not any judgment on my parents, who are distinctly un-Pontifex-like, bearing no resemblance morally or in any other respect -- pleased to say -- to Christina and Theobald.)
By the same token, I was impressed in reading Mr. Biswas by what I took to be an astonishingly prescient look at the frustrations of the the householder stage of life, from someone who was only in his late twenties. But then, of course, I am in my late twenties, from which vantage point I made this assessment of how "prescient" or otherwise the book might be. Perhaps Naipaul's book tells us less about middle age, then, than it does about how middle age appears to the distinctly angst-ridden person approaching thirty, who is imagining what it will be like to enter that phase.
Perhaps, then, this is not so much a great novel of the mid-life crisis -- as it might at first appear -- but of the more recently named quarter-life crisis (I owe my usage of the term to my sister). The latter is of course an invention of the millennial generation-- like most forms of needless postmodern suffering. But it is one that nonetheless could have stirred inchoately in certain advanced souls in the early to mid-20th century, before it had been given a name. Perhaps Mr. Biswas was a millennial avant la lettre.
***
Wanting to explore this hypothesis further, it seemed necessary to understand something about the process of Mr. Biswas' creation. How had the young Naipaul -- roughly my age at the time, I again despairingly emphasize the point -- managed to write this sinuous epic of middle age, and one that happens in the process to be one of the greatest, most amusing, and most moving books I have ever read?
Looking for answers, I turned to Patrick French's 2008 literary biography of Naipaul, The World is What It Is. The book was famous -- with an edge of notoriety -- back when it first came out, due to its extensive revelations of Naipaul's cruelty, bigotry, and callousness toward the people closest to him. And in these respects, it does not disappoint expectations. The Naipaul of its pages is emotionally abusive toward his first wife, Pat, and physically so toward his long-time mistress Margaret. A short time before Pat's death sees Naipaul writing notes to his accountant with instructions on what to do with Pat's diaries after her death, so that they can become a part of his legacy. Within days of Pat's passing, his second wife has already moved into the house, and Naipaul has resolved to cut off all ties with his mistress of several decades... but since he can't bring himself to actually tell her the relationship is over, he simply freezes all communication, stops answering her calls, and eventually leaves it to his literary agent to broken an agreement to send her family some money. He is constantly giving people the silent treatment and the brush-off over insignificant offenses.
All of this is only too much a part of French's tale, and accounts in part for why the book is so dull for long stretches, in spite of its author's fine writing and research: Naipaul makes for poor company. There are few people less interesting to hear from than the truly self-centered, and this is not news. Yet it seems paradoxical to find that this applies no less to a great novelist. Writers, after all, are often supposed to contemplate obsessively their own experiences and perceptions, aren't they? One would think self-centeredness in that case would be a plus.
But really what is needed for that kind of writing is self-awareness, and of this, self-centeredness is the bane. To be truly aware of oneself is to be aware of oneself in relation to others, since the self is a social construction.
Thus, by taking so little notice of the feelings of others, Naipaul turns out to have very little to say about himself as well. His letters are not particularly shot through with perceptions or telling details. This is partly due to the fact that a significant portion of his archives were lost -- French dismayingly informs us -- when warehouse employees at the site they were kept mistook the boxes marked "Naipaul" for the papers of the "Nitrate" corporation they were trying to destroy. French also tells us that Naipaul simply preferred to save his insights for his work, rather than sharing them through his personal interactions and correspondence. But this relative silence seems also to be a result of his inability and unwillingness to reflect on his own limitations and behavior.
(Side-note: fortunately, the interest of French's book is salvaged from the unpleasantness of its subject by being full of tiny bits of lore, trivia, and esoteric Naipauliana -- my absolute favorite being the fact that the famous melodic riff of the James Bond theme actually originated as a song, "Bad Sign/Good Sign" in a House for Mr. Biswas stage-musical adaptation. French also buries easter eggs in the book for our hunting pleasure. I was astonished to find Kayne West, for instance, listed in the acknowledgements. I had no idea when I found it whether this was a joke or in deadly earnest. I know the barest minimum that one can know about the life of Kanye West, while still having been alive as a human being in the United States of America in the years 1990-2018, so I thought maybe he did have some obscure connection to Naipaul that I never knew about. He appears nowhere in the index, however, and it seems I was not the first to spot the joke. The Paris Review is on the case -- though I regret that I too missed French's bogus footnote.)
The result of Naipaul's coldness, however, is that the quotations of greatest interest in French's biography do not come from the pen of the Nobel laureate himself-- but from the people around him. We have Pat's image of Margaret Thatcher, for one, as a kind of Janus-faced demon: "a beautiful idol who could, through a change in circumstances, some dreadful magic, become ugly. I saw her as the goddess Kali, double imaged, turning to reveal the tusks, the blood." Has anything better ever been written about Margaret Thatcher (apart maybe from the scene in Trainspotting where Renton tries to delay his climax by contemplating her, so as to lessen the arousal... or maybe from Martin Amis' description of the strangely masochistic school-boyish crush that Philip Larkin developed on the Prime Minister, who once quoted to him in conversation as one of her favorite sections from his work a line about sexual violence)? But surely nothing more accurate has ever been said of her.
Then there is also Pat's take on the media's untiring willingness to report the crude right-wing utterances of the late-period Kingsley Amis. "Why are they so tolerant of extremes, petulance, childishly reactionary views?" she asks. "We just believe that middle-aged writers are like that. We have this ridiculous faith, we believe it is a protective covering, the wizard's cloak, beneath which they preserve their real selves for serious work." Words that very obviously could be said of her husband, as well, though neither Pat nor French -- in quoting the passage -- feel the need to make this point explicit.
I also owe to French's book the discovery of Diana Athill -- Naipaul's editor at André Deutsch -- who is an exceptionally luminous author, and who supplies interest in the biography where Naipaul himself becomes too intolerable. I swiftly went out to buy her Make Believe and Instead of a Letter, on the strength of the passages French had quoted, and found Athill in reading them to be a model of the kind of self-awareness that a writer ought to have, in order to hold one's attention. She is obsessively self-revealing, precisely because she is not self-centered. Her ability to observe herself in such minute and unstinting detail is made possible by her deep understanding of others. She memorably describes this characteristic of herself in Make Believe, during a scene in which Hakim Jamal tries to lead her down a pseudo-Freudian guilt trip, urging her to reveal to him submerged traumas and sins from her past. "But how could I do that," she writes, "when nothing seemed to me too wicked or too embarrassing? Surely he must realize [...] what a glutton I am for discussing my own and everyone else's behaviour?" If she had ever murdered anyone for instance, she swears to him, she would have turned it into a book by now.
But if Naipaul seems to lack this essential gift for self-revelation, one wonders, how then was he able to write a book of such emotional sweep and power as Mr. Biswas?
It may not be possible fully to answer this question. One possibility that comes to mind is that, because the barrier to self-reflection in Naipaul's mind was his unwillingness to acknowledge his own shortcomings, he was able to write convincingly about human experience if he could persuade himself that he was talking about someone else, rather than himself.
This I had not realized, when I first picked up Biswas. I had thought the book might be a sort of alternative universe autobiography -- the life Naipaul might have lived if he had never escaped Trinidad. Instead I learned from French's biography that, while this may be partially true, the novel is far more obviously based on the life of Naipaul's father, Seepersad.
A far vaster number of the details of Naipaul's book have their real-life analogues, then, than I had realized while reading it. The indelibly described "Hanuman House" of the book was the really existing Lion House of Seepersad's in-laws. The ham-handed courting by a sign-painter (Mohun Biswas/Seepersad) of one of the daughters of the house (Shama/Droupatie) is actually more or less how Naipaul's parents met.
More obscurely, the name of the wife of Gurudeva, in Seepersad's only work of fiction -- Ratni -- is given (rather hilariously) to the awful wife-figure in Mr. Biswas's cringe-worthy escapist fantasies, starring himself as "John Lubbard." (Ratni is a loathsome figure in these stories who stands between our hero and his true love interest "Sybil"). "Go and take Sybil to the pictures," Shama tongue-lashes Mr. Biswas, upon discovering one of the stories while he is away: "Leave Ratni alone."
Where the deviations from reality do take place, they are subtle and question-begging. If Mr. Biswas is Naipaul's father, then his quiet, intellectual, and depressive son Anand is surely Naipaul himself (the personality would fit the bill). Yet there is another character in the novel named Vidiadhar (V.S. Naipaul's given name) who appears not as Mr. Biswas's son, but as Anand's doltish rival. This Vidiadhar is the offspring of Mr. Biswas's frères-enemis, the in-laws Chinta and Govind, with whom Biswas's struggles are a delicious source of distinctly Trinidadian badinage throughout the novel. (Govind is often dismissed as a "crab-catcher," for instance).
Similarly, the names of V.S. Naipaul's actual siblings appear in the novel, but he reverses the birth order. In real life, Kamla was the older sister, and Savi the next younger. (As they emerge in French's biography, these highly accomplished sisters appear surprisingly delighted with Naipaul's book, despite the fact that the novel's "Savi" exclaims in one scene, "I am too glad [...] that God didn't give me a brain.")
This is all a point in favor of this being a book that should astound us, for having emerged from the mind of one so young. If Mr. Biswas is in many ways Seepersad, then the novel that tells his story is surely an extraordinary work of creative artistry by a son reconstructing -- by force of imagination alone -- what his father's emotions and experiences of life might have been like on his journey into middle age and early death. And it is all of that.
I am also convinced, however, that the portrayal of Mohun Biswas is at least in part a projection of Vidiadhar's own self as well. Therefore, as claimed above, this is in many ways a 29-year-old's book. It is a tale, as mentioned, of the quarter-life crisis.
***
This is the sort of crisis that can only come about once one is well advanced toward thirty -- at the earliest -- because it is only possible once one has settled some of the first and most immediate post-adolescent crises of young adulthood -- the quest for autonomy, e.g., and for a role in society in which one can be helpful to -- and appreciated by -- other people.
A House for Mr. Biswas follows its protagonist through those earlier dramas as well, of course, it being an account of an entire lifespan. Mohun Biswas, condemned by his "cat-in-bag" marriage to live in a house -- Hanuman House -- that is stuffed to the brim with in-laws, all engaged in tireless conflict and competition with one another ("obdurate wars," to borrow a wonderful phrase from another famous V.S. -- V.S. Pritchett), begins to fear in his early adulthood that he has made no imprint on the world. As an irrelevant and replaceable appendage to this unchanging and cluttered scene, he is aware that life in Hanuman House would continue without him much as it had before. He longs therefore for property -- land of his own -- and distinguishing achievement (Biswas is a great reader of Samuel Smiles), so that the world will know that Mohun Biswas lived.
As this fear mounts, an experience eventually overwhelms him that I recall most vividly from my own early twenties -- namely, an acute case of agoraphobia. In Biswas's case, it occurs while he is perusing The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A terror -- visualized as a kind of black cloud -- sweeps in upon his mind, leaving him suddenly terrified of encountering other people.
The way Naipaul describes what follows is exactly as I recall it, from my own bouts with similar phobias, and surely these sections of Biswas are among the most vivid and convincing depictions of an anxiety disorder ever committed to the page. There is the sudden incapacity to do things that one had always done easily in the past (getting on an airplane, in my case), and a sort of disbelieving admiration at the blithe unconcern of one's former self -- a conviction that ordinary activities like driving on the highway are in fact prodigies of bravery. "His whole past became a miracle of calm and courage," as Naipaul puts it.
There is likewise the self-defeating quality of the anxiety. For Biswas, his fear is focused on people -- other human beings. He suddenly -- overnight -- develops a terror of social interaction. Yet what he fears most from other people is that they will abandon him, and he will be left alone. He both desires and dreads this isolation, such that he is placed into an impossible emotional position. (This is always how it is -- it is the fear of social rejection that induces social anxiety -- yet if rejection is what one fears, then exiling oneself from human society is no answer to it.)
At the time these anxieties were most powerful in me, I attributed them to specific stressors in my personal life. Looking back now, however, I can see that they were also an extreme reaction to conflicts and terrors that are unavoidable for anyone at that age. In my early twenties, I hadn't yet accomplished any of the things I aimed to do with my adult life. (Of course I hadn't -- I was just getting started.) At the same time, I was no longer in the protective cocoon of childhood, where the future can be counted on with certainty, while also being so impossibly distant that it can be dreamed of without needing to make very specific plans.
My anxiety therefore took the form of an exaggerated fear of dying. I was convinced that I needed to place myself only into situations in which I was positive no harm could befall me, so that I could be sure I would not be snuffed out before I had even had the chance to leave my mark on the world.
(Given that there are no ways to live in absolute safety in this unknowable world, these efforts didn't get me far, as you can imagine. I soon realized that even if I could ensure -- by not flying -- that I would never be at risk of dying in a plane crash, there was still the danger that my body, my mind, or the structure of reality itself might give out on me. And so, at the age of twenty-three or so, I became distinctly obsessed with such subjects as cardiac arrhythmias, brain aneurisms, the snapping of elevator cables, and the possibility of going mad or being visited by extra-dimensional beings or discovering the existence of Lovecraftian metaphysical entities.)
Mr. Biswas does eventually make his mark on the world, however. He has four children. He moves to the city and begins a new career as a journalist. With these changes, his agoraphobia begins to dissipate.
In the very escape from the terrors of early young adulthood, however, the potentiality for future angst is to be found. This is where the quarter-life crisis comes in. Everyone I know my age, as they start to acquire the trappings of real "maturity," as our society defines it (a house, a partner, a full-time job that they see as part of their "career," rather than a one-off, etc.) has experienced something like it, and oddly, it seems to be brought on not by failure, so much as by modest success. Both my sister and I, for instance, attained stable employment in our late twenties in fields we were passionate about. We had partially solved the problem of social roles, she as a teacher, and I as a human rights worker We both felt we were doing something we enjoyed, and occupying positions from which we could be of some use to others.
And we both -- no sooner than we had obtained these conditions of stasis -- felt a sharp need to disturb them. The appalling thing about waking up one day in your late twenties and discovering that you have managed to become "settled," is that it means the quest is over. You are no longer struggling to figure out what it is you might do with your life, what you are called to contribute, etc. And while there is a comfort in that, there is also a profound loss of options.
I would not have come close to understanding this, if anyone had tried to explain it to me even a year or so earlier. I would have said that if I could only obtain employment in a social justice field, I would renounce all other claims of this world, I would declare victory and eternal happiness would be mine.
Never would I have dreamed that I would one day look back on those most intensely miserable of years -- the immediate post-college years -- with something like nostalgia. But the truth is that, before you have figured out your life's path, you might end up doing virtually anything. You are still free to dream. And that imparts to those difficult times a distinctive excitement and -- to use Mr. Biswas's term for it -- freedom.
Late in the book, Mr. Biswas looks back with something like fondness on his unhappy days at Hanuman House. Returning to the sight of his first post-adolescent years, he recalls his feelings at the time. "Here, claimed by no one," writes Naipaul, "he had reflected on the unreality of his life, and had wished to make a mark on the wall as proof of his existence. Now he needed no such proof. Relationships had been created and he stood at their centre. [But...] In that very unreality had lain freedom. Now he was encumbered[.]"
It is the same condition that Maurice warns against in Penelope Fitzgerald's Off-Shore (a book which, incidentally -- I learned from French's biography -- nudged out Naipaul's A Bend in the River in order to claim the 1979 Booker Prize)-- the condition of having reached a conclusion, of some sort -- of having decided on the way one's grown-up life is going to be. "Decision is torment for anyone with imagination," he says. "When you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can."
Here's the paradox of it: it's not necessary to dislike one's job or one's life, in order to have the quarter-life crisis. One can be fond indeed of where one ended up (this is why I was so incapable of understanding my sister's quarter-life crisis, until I was in the midst of one myself -- "but don't you enjoy teaching?" I would ask her). All that is necessary is to realize that by being one thing in this world, it is no longer possible to be anything else -- at least not wholly. One is stuck with being oneself, and is not likely to discover that one is any other sort of person. One is confronted by, as the narrator of Pirandello's One None and a Hundred Thousand puts it: "the terror that comes from blind necessities, from things that cannot change; the prison of time; being born now, and not before or after; the name and body that is given one; the chain of causality." (Putnam trans.)
Again, it is possible to have an emotional melt-down over this, without necessarily feeling that the particular rut in the passage of time in which one was cast was a bad one. As Diana Athill writes of her school days in Instead of a Letter: "The things I had to do at school were not objectionable [...]It was the absence of things which had to be endured: the absence of freedom[.]"
***
Once one has had this awakening, the crisis begins. The results bear a striking resemblance to the stereotypical features of the mid-life crisis, although they are less often caricatured in our popular culture and less well understood. There is the sudden appearance of obsessions, for instance, that never showed any signs of materializing before. Don DeLillo says of one fixated character in his novel Libra that she is "like someone in middle life who finds she was born to show pedigreed dogs. Nothing that happened before has any meaning compared to this." I think my sister -- who, as I say, first introduced me to the term -- would be the first to agree that this is one of the forms her quarter-life crisis took -- a certain Korean pop group being the pedigreed dogs in this case.
Another form of the crisis, however, is the desire to make sudden and extreme changes in one's career (the two forms are closely related -- both being variants on the quest for self-reinvention). If one is coming dangerously close to settling in, one thinks, then by gum, one will show them all wrong by starting over on an entire different and wholly unexpected track.
This was the form my own madness took this year. What, you might ask, is the field of human achievement in which I have shown perhaps the least native aptitude, throughout my entire grown-up life (apart from sports)? Why, that would be mathematics, and the natural sciences that depend most heavily upon it. Surely the thing to do to get past my quarter-life crisis, therefore, was to enter a pre-medical post-bacc program, study physics and chemistry for two years, and enter medical school.
Surely that would defeat the passage of time -- that outdated conservative -- and show that there was life in me yet, I was still young enough to begin everything over again.
I confess that in my insanity, and having realized that the application required no letters of recommendation (and could therefore be kept hidden from the mocking eyes of the doubters and naysayers, and perhaps from Father Time himself), I even applied and was accepted into the Harvard Extension School premed program.
I was well in the midst of this stage of the madness when I first started reading Biswas, and I therefore thrilled and shared in our hero's buoyancy of spirits when he enters Port of Spain -- having survived his crisis of agoraphobia -- and declares: "The past was counterfeit, a series of cheating accidents. Real life, and its especial sweetness, awaited; he was still beginning."
And I shared his sense of deflation -- and made a grudging acknowledgement that of course he was right, and I had always known it too -- when he admits to himself a bare ten pages later:
"His freedom was over, and it had been false. The past could not be ignored; it was never counterfeit; he carried it within himself. If there was a place for him, it was one that had already been hollowed out by time, by everything he had lived through, however imperfect, makeshift, and cheating."
By the time I'd finished the book, I was somewhat more prepared to admit to myself that it was this latter passage that came closer to the truth of things, and that I would never answer affirmatively that letter of post-bacc admission. My dreams have now crystalized instead around the also extravagant -- but slightly more realistic, because more based upon my known interests, skill-set, and professional history -- project of going to law school.
***
There is consolation of a sort for the millennial to be found in Mr. Biswas, from seeing one's own fears and struggles so beautifully described. This does not mean, however, that there is any happy ending for Mohun Biswas. Indeed, the novel is one of the saddest that I have ever read. Be cautious in reading it therefore if you are yourself of an anxious and depressive character, as it will tell you that you are right to fear death and the passage of time, and that it is more than possible to end one's life in a state of frustration and defeat, and to have one's creative ambitions stifled by the demands and responsibilities of adult life.
Here's where the parallels to one's own late twenties or early thirties start piling on with disconcerting force -- the encounters with shysters and cheating real estate deals, the misery of thinking one has escaped from paying rent only to to run into the equivalent onus of paying property taxes ("Rates, which had always seemed as remote as fog or snow," writes Naipaul, "now had a meaning."), the finding of a place to live and trying to convince oneself each day that it was a smart purchase, despite observing new problems with it with the rising of each sun ("Soon they began to keep their discoveries secret," writes Naipaul, in describing the family's arrival at the eponymous house that Mr. Biswas has finally claimed. "Anand discovered that the square pillars of the front fence, so pretty with Morning Glory, were made of hollow brick that rested on no foundation. The Pillars rocked at the push of a finger.")
Yet, the book is also among the funniest that one will ever read. This is really no paradox, as the funniest and the saddest observations of human life are essentially of the same variety -- they are the ones that are the most true. Mr. Biswas observes his own feelings of pain and dismay in the novel upon reading Maupassant's story "The Necklace." Writes Naipaul: "He had never been able to understand why it was considered a comic story [... W]ith all its ifs and might-have-beens the story came too near the truth: hope followed by blight, the passing of the years, the passing of life itself, and then the revelation of waste: Oh, my poor Matilda! But they were false!"
The irony of course is that Mr. Biswas himself appears in a comic story, made all the more comic -- and all the more sad -- by coming so near the truth. In a letter to Pat excerpted in French's biography, the young Naipaul had apparently once written to his wife: "Don't you want me to keep on being a corrosive satirist? It is my nature. If I write otherwise I shall cry as I write, like Dickens. I can't write about sadness sadly. It would kill me." Yet Biswas is a much sadder book for also being a satiric one -- again -- because this is what makes it more real.
As the great Quentin Crisp observes in his memoir The Naked Civil Servant: "if you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist."
Human life is always funny, as well as sad, because it is lived in defiance of the elements, in the face of the remorseless passage of time, and in pursuit of dreams of immortality and other glimmerings of the eternal that are, by definition, impossible for finite and mutable creatures to fully attain. It is hilarious that I, of all people, would seriously contemplate chucking a job I love and a living salary, just before I hit thirty, in order to go do organic chemistry problem sets at which I would be a total disaster -- just as if I were back in the worst of high school again, and that I would contemplate this so seriously that I would actually apply to a non-degree program in the subject -- but it's also exactly what I did.
***
Mr. Biswas's (and his creator's) quarter-life crisis remind us of our illusions, and the realities against which they will always break, like so many crashing waves. That is the key to both the comedy and the tragedy of the novel. And the lesson to be learned from it is at least partially one of submission. It is the way of the cross. It is abasing oneself before the divine will.
It is to recognize that there is no other option than that of having been who one was, and of being who one is. That one cannot be any other than the specific person who was born to one's own parents, that there is no escape from "the prison of time; being born now, and not before or after; the name and body that is given one; the chain of causality" mentioned above. It is the message of Davidson's poem, "Thirty Bob a Week":
My weakness and my strength without a doubt
Are mine alone for ever from the first:
It's just the very same with a difference in the name
As 'Thy will be done.' You say it if you durst!
They say it daily up and down the land
As easy as you take a drink, it's true;
But the difficultest go to understand,
And the difficultest job a man can do,
Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week,
And feel that that's the proper thing for you.
***
But then, having internalized this message, and having decided against medical school as a result, one next turns to Diana Athill, as mentioned above. And there, in Instead of the Letter, we find something quite different. And perhaps this is no less true. Perhaps it is the very accepting of oneself and one's distinct lot in life for what it is, that empowers one to then proceed to change it in positive directions.
Writes Athill: "Most of my thirties were overshadowed, when I allowed myself to notice it, not only by my forties but by my old age: by a sense that there was nothing ahead but old age [...] Now that I am, in fact, several years nearer to that [stage...] I have, perversely, stopped feeling old. [...] This is because the present has become real. No one can be detached from his past [this is what Mr. Biswas had to realize, recall], but anyone can come to see it as being past, and when that happens one is liberated partly from its consequences. [...] Then is less real than now, and now has become potent enough to shape the future[.]"
Perhaps this, then, is why A House for Mr. Biswas is ultimately a 29-year-old's book, rather than a book about middle age. It is about the fear that middle and old age inspire in someone of our age, because we are only just waking up to the fact that we have a single life, and that it will eventually pass.
But perhaps, once we have learned and reconciled ourselves to that truth, new kinds of freedom await -- freedoms that are not based on an effort to escape the past, such as those pursued by Mr. Biswas -- but freedoms achieved in full recognition of the past that has gone before. Perhaps middle age and old age will not at all be like we imagine then to be, when we are dreading their arrival preemptively in our quarter-life crises.
Perhaps, to come full circle, Samuel Butler was right, in The Way of All Flesh, when he writes:
"True, in old age we live under the shadow of Death, which, like a sword of Damocles, may descend at any moment, but we have so long found life to be an affair of being rather frightened than hurt that we have become like the people who live under Vesuvius, and chance it without much misgiving."
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