There is a moment in Italo Svevo's poignant early novel, As a Man Grows Older--one of two books the Triestene writer published during his period of obscurity as a young author, before he gave up literature in discouragement, only to be coaxed back decades later into setting pen to paper by an improbable and fateful friendship with James Joyce--when the novel's hapless and irresolute, yet touching and lovable protagonist Emilio (a forerunner in these qualities of Svevo's later and more famous literary creation Zeno Cosini) is suddenly reminded, by the sight of a group of laborers on a river, of his earlier socialist convictions.
It occurs to him that these beliefs, his former political faith and the visionary dreams of human flourishing that they engendered, now seem very remote from him. It's not that he ever renounced them; they just seem distant from his present life. And at once this fact fills him with shame. "He was stricken with remorse for having betrayed his earlier ideals and aspirations," writes Svevo (De Zoete trans. throughout); "for the moment the whole of his present life seemed to him to be a kind of apostasy."
It's hard to reach the age of Svevo's protagonist--the mid-thirties--without encountering moments in one's own life in which one can relate to Emilio's feelings (at least, I hope that most of us have some political idealism that glowed within us at one point, to which we can look back in our senility with wistfulness and self-reproach). It may be that we are enduring nothing more strange than what our elders always told us to expect of age: that the world would not prove as simple as we thought; that social problems might be more intractable than we had once believed; that good intentions accomplished far less than we were inclined to suppose.
But if this is the long-foretold political disillusionment, it feels far different from what the warnings all led one to expect. It's not that one stopped believing: or if one did, that had happened much earlier. I for one had reconciled myself years ago to the fact that the solution to one social problem breeds new ones in turn, and that the life of the activist is one of perpetual struggle; that was not a new insight to me. But the fact that the disillusionment could come so undramatically... that it could happen to one as it does to Emilio, where one casts a backward glance and discovers that the faith had wandered away from one miles back, that one had misplaced it somewhere on the road, that one had outpaced it without meaning to... that I was not prepared for.
In Emilio's case, this backward glance serves to briefly rekindle his visionary faith in socialism. His renewed excitement about the coming reign of liberty and justice becomes mixed, emotionally, with his infatuation with his newfound lover, Angiolina--the two things combined, his love and his political faith, coming to symbolize a second youth blooming unexpectedly in the midst of what he had become accustomed to think of as the premature old age of his thirties (the Italian title of the novel translates more literally to "Senility"). With the reawakening of a capacity for romance he had thought long dead within him, he feels stirring as well his belief in the possibility for a genuine transformation of humankind and a complete overhaul of its corrupt social institutions.
He tries to interest his lover in his visions: conjuring a "dream" for them both to enjoy in which all inequalities shall be abolished and peace and social justice shall triumph at last. She is bored and unpersuaded by such visions, despite (or, perhaps because of) her own greater connection to the working class that is ostensibly to be liberated. But Emilio is undeterred by this, and reflects toward the end of the novel that, after his love-affair ends and he returns to the quiet rut of his bachelor life, he would nonetheless always associate the two experiences in his memory: the rebirth of his capacity for love, and the reawakening of his ardor for visionary politics. In thinking of his former lover, writes Svevo, "[h]er figure even became a symbol. It was always looking in the same direction, towards the horizon, the future [....] She was waiting! The image embodied the dream he has once dreamed at Angiolina's side, which that child of the people could not understand."
In my own case, I know which period of my life and which symbols my memory uses to conjure a period of lost idealism: they are those years I spent, before coming to law school, as a full-time professional activist, wielding my pen, as Emilio recalls once doing himself, in the cause of social justice and human rights. And even though this period was not long ago now in real terms: barely more than eighteen months-- it already feels distant from me. I already look back on it with something of Emilio's wistfulness in watching the laborers on the river. Passing events will remind me of it, and I will be stricken with exactly the same emotions: shame, a sense of self-betrayal, and a realization that all of that seems so terribly long ago and irrecoverable now, if not irrelevant to who I have become since.
In the year since starting law school, I have often flagellated myself for idly casting away such a beautiful dream. I have even come to resent the people in my life whom I imagined had somehow talked me into making the fatal sacrifice; who had convinced me that it was worth turning aside from that path in order to pursue a law degree. Yet, these impulses to self-pity on my part, gratifying in a maudlin way as they may sometimes be, conveniently overlook two stubborn facts: first, that the world has changed in the last eighteen months; so even if I had not given up my former job, there is little guarantee that it would remain the same now as it was then; even if I had tried to hold onto the dream, that is, the dream might still have fled from me. And second--and relatedly--it is not only the world that changed; I changed.
Part of the reason I felt it necessary to leave, after all, is because the disillusionment was already at work. I had already started to repeat myself. I had crossed that invisible mental boundary that Milan Kundera calls "the border," in one of his novels, and which marks the outwardly imperceptible difference between the true believer and the one who merely goes through the motions of faith by rote. I had become someone who knew how to speak the tenets of the faith; to rehearse the whole political catechism-- but I was doing it without conviction. Even before I left for law school, therefore, I could already have gazed back like Emilio and reproached myself for disillusionment and lukewarmness; leaving the job to return to school just externalized the inward transformation that had already taken place.
And so, what I was really resenting, when I reproached my friends, was the loss of my own youth. I was attacking them for misplacing something that I had myself deposited by the side of the road a long way back without any help or interference from them. I had changed; but it was more comforting to believe that they had changed me. The world and the visionary dream of the past were gone; but rather than grieve their loss, it was more appealing to believe that they still existed, just where I had left them, and that I could reach out and seize them again, if only the other people in my life would stop blocking me; or if only they had not stolen them from me to begin with. Anything but face the simple fact of loss: that something once treasured was no longer there where I'd left it.
Does Emilio's experience (or Svevo's, for that matter) offer any hope? Is there a chance at a third act--a return of youth at the end of the story? An end to the premature "senility"? Yes and no. Emilio's tale ends in tragedy and loss: his sister, the only person who had always shared his lonely existence, perishes; his love affair is extinguished in a scene at once comic and grotesque (Svevo's work may be characterized as an "irony" in the best tradition of Flaubert's Sentimental Education, say: his all-too-human and all-too-modern characters seldom manage to bring about the effects they intend, or to match sordid reality to their Romantic imaginings).
But amidst his grief, Emilio takes heart from the experience of a neighbor, Elena, who has managed to find a new purpose in old age through living for the wellbeing and care of those closest to her. Her "example," writes Svevo, "had proved to him that even he might somewhere in life find his daily bread, his reason for living. [... H]e had forgotten all the elements of which his wretched life was composed, and thought that on that day he chose to begin again from the beginning, he would be able to do so."
The new purpose-- the new reason for existing-- the new "daily bread"-- does not necessarily come to resemble what gave one meaning in the past. The dream-- the political vision--does not return, at least not in as vivid colors as before. One may never be able to believe in it as fervently a second time. In Svevo's own case, he gave up writing for years, after this-- his second novel-- fell from the press into the oblivion of the public's indifference, just like his first. He went and led an ordinary family life and took up a conventional business career. This, after all, is open to one. Kafka did it (well, the business career part). Wallace Stevens did it. Why not oneself?
And in the meantime, one waits. One even trusts: the daily bread will come; the next summons; the next purpose. One awaits the arrival of one's personal Joyce, though he may not appear till decades later.
And, while one hopes for the future, one is also never truly robbed of the past. Even that which is lost lives on in one's memory. Emilio's image of his lover Angiolina as a "symbol" captures this ambivalence--this double-sided truth-- perfectly. Even as Emilio's "dream" of socialism and the ideal commonwealth is as dead as his love affair, after all, and belongs to a past that will never be revived, nonetheless it survives in memory--yet, more than that, it looks ahead. It points to the future, and toward the horizon. The dreams of the past foretell the new dreams that will come, though we know not yet what they are. I am reminded of how E.H. Carr, even in a book-length tract against all political idealism and utopianism, nonetheless saw fit to end by prophesying the creation of new utopias, new ideals to come.
Indeed. "She is waiting!"
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