On Reading: More Random Thoughts

As September draws to a close, I feel a mild compulsion to record something about my reading over the last few weeks. After finishing Bellow's Letters, I picked up a copy of Eileen Simpson's Poets in their Youth, which Bellow commented on, and which we happened to have a copy of in our much too extensive library. I've been reading this and catching up on back issues of TLS and the most recent Sewanee Review. As usual it's a rather desultory program, focused primarily on writers who lived and flourished just before and after World War II, and sometimes into the third quarter of the last century.

It's not entirely nostalgia that feeds my interest in that era, although it is probably a large part of the attraction, but also a growing curiosity about the ways those earlier generations perceived their own time and their relationships to it and previous times. With age and experience comes the realization that everything has happend before, many times, and that while we feel the immediate experience of our own passage through life as somehow novel and unique, that was precisely the way others experienced it themselves. And one common thread seems to be the sense of belatedness, that we've missed out on some important opportunities that our predecessors enjoyed. That appears to be the case even when writers are self-consciously rebelling against the past and trying desperately to push themselves into a future more or less unknown.

Simultaneously, we seem to feel ourselves both connected to and isolated from a past that was both better and worse than our own time, and which has left us a world that we cannot seem to alter to suit ourselves. On the one hand we can assess the various examples of technical and social progress, the automobile, air conditioning, television and computers; an end to Jim Crow, acceptance of inter-racial marriage, wide availability of college educations, social mobility. But these have all come at a price that includes for many wrenching displacement from deeply established communal attachments and from strong feelings of belonging and personal identity. There has also recently been a sense of accelerated change, but it takes only a little historical research to recognize that the sense of acceleration reaches back at least to the nineteenth century, and I would suspect even beyond that. Which is not to deny the reality, but perhaps more to reinforce the inevitability of the feelings of alienation that have come along with whatever progress we can point to.

Although this may seem to be depressing, in fact I find it comforting to know that my own experiences are far from unique. I have discovered that I enjoy learning more about those who came before me and attempted to cope in their own way with all the things I must learn to cope with myself. One lesson I have learned is that modern humans seem to be susceptible to the tyranny of the present. This takes at least two distinct forms: first, we seem to feel that the present moment is the culmination of history, the destination toward which all historical forces have been directed; and the second is that somehow, having reached this particular moment, this perceived destination, we will now rest here for a time. Of course, neither of these suppositions is accurate, as perhaps younger generations are coming to realize. Nothing human endures for very long; change is the only constant. We live in a versioning world; we always have and always will. Life is all about evolution.

Anyway, all this reading has made me want to return to my own little writing project and get back to recording my impressions of growing up in the middle of the twentieth century in San Antonio, Texas. At the time, I felt it was both the center of the universe and also a total backwater where the forces of history never seemed to reach. Much of that changed on November 22, 1963, when the real world came to Dallas, not really that far away, and again on August 1, 1966, in Austin, where my wife to be and I had just been to look for our first home. Strange that history should come in the form of tragedy and meaningless death, but then I suppose that's what history is when you get right down to it. History is final, but life goes on, even if it goes on without us. Everyone, it seems, wants to make a mark or at least leave an impression.