Random
Neurology, Experience, Age, and Re/reading
First, some anecdotia:
1. Last semester, I assigned the essay “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White to my students. Most of them were not into it. I suggested that the author’s inner conflicts about change and aging might be more real to them when they are older; they were even less into that. I don’t blame them for being offended; it’s no good to be told we are too young to understand something. I’m not much older than them, so in my mind I was implicating myself in that, but even so.
2. When I was twenty, a much older friend told me that, at my age, I had to listen to Horses by Patti Smith. I did, a lot, and rarely do anymore. Around the same time, I read something in the New Yorker about how the author loved Sylvia Plath in her (or his? can’t remember) late teens/early twenties. I felt somehow offended. I never read much Plath, but I was reading a lot of Sexton at the time. I don’t read much Sexton anymore.
3. When I was 13, I tried reading Austen. I didn’t get very far. When I was 16, I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I liked it, but I don’t remember thinking it was very funny. That year, I also read Lolita up to the point of the motel sex scene, then quit. I don’t remember thinking the writing was particularly special. These days, I count Emma, Huckleberry Finn, and Lolita as top-favorite most-important-t0-me novels. The ones that delight me the most.
4. Last year, I went to a Leonard Cohen concert. I’ve always really liked his songs, especially the early ones. Birds on wires, Janis Joplin giving head and all that. The concert was by all definitions amazing. Technically perfect and highly charged. He kept falling to his knees or something. But I wasn’t moved as much as I would have liked. I kept thinking, he is old. He has accomplished so much, and here is the fruit of all that. A packed house. What more could he want. I believe that my failure to be moved had to do with not being able to comprehend what he still wanted, feared, needed, regretted after so many years and so much success without seeming to compromise. Sure, he must fear death and regret something, but I didn’t hear that in his singing.
This kind of thing is still happening to me. Does it happen to you? Are you offended yet, as I was and still probably would be if someone told me I’m just not ready for Cormac McCarthy yet, or that in time I will grow out of Frank O’Hara?
Research shows that our brain is still developing into our late twenties. What effect if any does that have on our taste in books? On how much delight we feel, or how much we “get it,” or when we are moved or not? Something in me resists it.
On the other hand, it’s comforting to think that there is something additive about aging. That we keep understanding more things. That an increased knowledge of and commerce with language and the world will further unblock us from art.
It isn’t too hard to see how learning and living more would have made me more receptive of Lolita at 25 than I was at 16. But what about 45 versus 35? Is there some endpoint where what books we are into hasn’t anything to do with our age but with what phase we’re in as far as our interests, the context of other things we’re reading and/or writing, how depressed or not depressed we are, if we like our job, what happens to matter to us right then, what fears are currently most salient, etc.? In other words, with factors that are independent of age, that go in cycles perhaps?
I’m interested in that, too, and how that works. Because I at least have some illusions of being this mind that is developed and that is independent of what’s going on in my life, my relationships, even my feelings, and that it is that independent mind that encounters art. Much evidence is to the contrary, but much isn’t. I very much doubt, even if I’m not in the “mood” to read them at a particular point, that I will ever be closed off entirely to the writers that are now most important to me: Dickens, Austen, Carson, Nabokov, Stevens. But on the other side of that, I fully expect to have more use for Cormac McCarthy and Kafka in future encounters.
I want to hear your anecdotia and theories about this, too. What have you reread that you once didn’t get much from, but now do? What is on your reread list in this vein? What did you used to read a lot of, that you don’t anymore? Why, do you think? Do you attribute your degree of openness to a particular work to age/brain development/more life experience, or to a life/reading/emotional phase, or both or neither?
I’m going to close this with a Patti Smith song from long after Horses, one that I (still) really like and that relates thematically to phases of reading, as you can tell from the title: “In My Blakean Year.” This is the studio version with pictures of her for video; the live versions are either bad sound or she talks annoyingly about William Blake for too long. Here:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6XUeYVfGJM
Some people – many; most – , whether by choice or training or irresistible proclivity, ‘settle’. Others, less so. One can choose to make oneself . . . uncomfortable: for example, every few years, to learn a new language, or to gain dilettante fluency in a science or fine art. I think you can push ineluctably ‘new’ perspective into your anticipatory framework(s).
But the mind is a living thing, in the sense that its contents/constitution, in their parts, expand and contract in accordance with obscure regulation. You can hope to be surprised by familiar and by ‘new’ writers (say), but I doubt that you can plan a new view with much deserved confidence.
To me, evaluations – even ones that feel fundamental – remain (at least a little) fluid, at play, and at risk. No matter how dogmatically set one is – “Dickens” is X – , there’s the more-or-less likelihood that that value one calls “Dickens” will mutate under the pressure of new perspectives (especially but not exclusively one’s own).
To me, there’s little point in irascibility at one’s own process – liking ordinary stuff too much then; not getting it with the good stuff ’til now – . I think it’s possible to be patient with the certainty that young (and older!) people sometimes have without being condescending about it. ‘Well, I like Austen – here’s why: ‘ – and relax about seeds eventually growing, or not.
The authors I’ve loved and then forgotten were usually the ones who startled me the most, who were my introduction into a way of thinking, or pointed to something that I had never seen before. This is where Vonnegut was for me and a lot of younger people. His writing seemed so much a reaction against I had grown tired of (or that he made me tired of), so much on one side. One thing we know from a lot of neuro research, particularly in perception, is that when presented with an object very different from what we’re used to, we focus broadly on the differences between that object and what is ordinary for us rather than seeing it as a wholly individual thing with so many particulars. Once we have internalized this new thing we can (without effort) see its own characteristics more closely—what makes Vonnegut Vonnegut, so to speak, rather than what makes him so entirely new. Sometimes the books we’ve loved hold up to such scrutiny, and sometimes they don’t. That is, I think, one thing going on—one thing of many. That the brain continues to develop into the 20s does not mean that we are in the same state of mind at 40 as we will be at 70, although we more or less settle into certain habits. (I like what deadgod has to say about this.) This is only part of what you were talking about, but it’s one little thing I’ve wondered about before.
Fix: “His writing seemed so much a reaction against all I had grown tired of…”
Yeah Cohen’s been phoning it in. I think his poor manager ripped him off, which created the need for an 80 year old man to tour two years straight. His daughter just had a baby with Rufus Wainwright.
It sounds like you’re saying that, once the novelty of Vonnegut’s voice wore off – once his voice became familiar – , you grew to find his use of that voice to be ‘not all that effective’.
I think what Amy’s asking is whether this change is, for you, a matter of sadness or irritation or what. I mean that, in changing, has something been lost from your taste? – or from your sense of openness?
There’s an anxiety in here. That of: maximizing, getting the right book for the right moment, optimizing. The more I think about it, the more I am basically totally confused when it comes to how I arrived anywhere, aesthetically. There are some monuments on the map, but that’s about it. Mostly, I try to dodge that anxiety and let myself falter, fall out of books, music, culture, fail in my capacity moreso than ever. Abundant supply supports this plan, as does a short(ish) attention span. If I had read A Confederacy of Dunces a year earlier, maybe I would have returned to the slighter books and never pushed on… Nutty, thinking like that. I say Let’s Discount Agency a little, and favor hardwiring, encouragement, and access. Those three things build the path, in the beginning at least. Then agency, with all its trappings, steps in front and puffs it chest.
I think that certain authors and certain works of literature appeal to people when they hit a certain age. I loved Ayn Rand when in my twenties, and couldn’t appreciate Dickens until I hit 40. Isn’t it exciting when different works of art speak to us at different times of our life?
ha, i didn’t know that about his daughter. i like rufus wainwright’s late mother kate mcgarrigle’s stuff more than leonard cohen’s in many ways. i dunno, though, while i was aware that he was on tour out of financial necessity, it didn’t have a phoning it in feel to me. he seemed really in it, and he’d done these big orchestral arrangements, and could have probably made lots of money for less effort. i think my not being moved had to do with something else. all the polish, maybe, as if he himself, as an artist, had been polished off nicely, whereas i still have a lot ahead of me, as he did when he sang about birds and blowjobs.
wow, yes. i can’t wait to hear more of your take on this. you say it better, too. i hadn’t thought about it this way but a lot of these concerns are rooted in anxiety about locus of control. i have a hard time admitting that so many un-, or sub- or super-, conscious forces are at work. there’s this feeling too of, what if i missed my chance.
wow, yes. i can’t wait to hear more of your take on this. you say it better, too. i hadn’t thought about it this way but a lot of these concerns are rooted in anxiety about locus of control. i have a hard time admitting that so many un-, or sub- or super-, conscious forces are at work. there’s this feeling too of, what if i missed my chance.
Great post, Amy. Nothing weirds me out more than when I run into friends from college or even high school who I haven’t seen for years–and they still have the EXACT SAME TASTE IN MUSIC/MOVIES/ETC. It’s like, hey, there’s been some new stuff since then and oh by the way–haven’t you evolved at ALL? Haven’t you CHANGED? Like probably a lot of women, I was way into Sexton and Plath when I was in high school and early college. Same with the Beats, and Burroughs. Same with Ayn Rand, like Jack M. I’m not so much into any of those things anymore. Same thing with hip-hop–I was way into hip-hop, pretty much all I listened to in college, and now, not so much. I still listen to some but don’t find myself into it the way I used to. Some things stay the same–love for Beckett and Shakespeare and Woolf–and some things, like Stevens, I’ve discovered anew and love now. I have more patience, and less need for noise. More need for subtlety, less for angst. I fear death now, and I’d like less to celebrate the idea of dying young. I care more about the world and less about myself. If I wasn’t reading/watching/listening to different things, it wouldn’t make any sense. The disconnect would be jarring.
People change. If your tastes don’t, what does that say about you?
Great post, Amy. Nothing weirds me out more than when I run into friends from college or even high school who I haven’t seen for years–and they still have the EXACT SAME TASTE IN MUSIC/MOVIES/ETC. It’s like, hey, there’s been some new stuff since then and oh by the way–haven’t you evolved at ALL? Haven’t you CHANGED? Like probably a lot of women, I was way into Sexton and Plath when I was in high school and early college. Same with the Beats, and Burroughs. Same with Ayn Rand, like Jack M. I’m not so much into any of those things anymore. Same thing with hip-hop–I was way into hip-hop, pretty much all I listened to in college, and now, not so much. I still listen to some but don’t find myself into it the way I used to. Some things stay the same–love for Beckett and Shakespeare and Woolf–and some things, like Stevens, I’ve discovered anew and love now. I have more patience, and less need for noise. More need for subtlety, less for angst. I fear death now, and I’d like less to celebrate the idea of dying young. I care more about the world and less about myself. If I wasn’t reading/watching/listening to different things, it wouldn’t make any sense. The disconnect would be jarring.
People change. If your tastes don’t, what does that say about you?
thank you for bringing up patience. that definitely applies to teaching, as you seem to be getting at, but i could also be a little more patient with myself, both with what might be in store and with the past. to quit destroying old journals, etc.
haha, so true. i feel like i can tell even if i didn’t know someone before whether their taste hasn’t changed since college, or even high school.
i think it’s worth revisiting some of that, too, though. i read a lot of didion toward the end of and just after college, and then A Year of Magical Thinking came out and i wasn’t that into it and suddenly everyone loved didion, so i stopped reading her for the wrong reasons. but then, after teaching “The White Album” and “Goodbye to All That,” I’ve recently found that I still have a lot to learn from her both as a writer and, let’s face it, as a woman (that packing list in “The White Album?” leotards and bourbon? i’m still not that cool). and she’s just so delightful. i went through a similar thing with hemingway’s short stories. it’s true–i probably won’t revisit ayn rand. but maybe toni morrison? haven’t read faulkner since high school either….
Also, you can “get it”–appreciate what a writer’s succeeding at–without having the work hit your pleasure spots. Like a cool album that does nothing for you, you get it and don’t get it.
Sometimes I read something and then hold “wow, they’re on to something” and “absolutely not right now” in tandem, then I move on and read something else.
Great post, Amy.
I think part of the changes in my tastes are due not only to my ability to appreciate/understand things I didn’t have enough experience or patience for when I was younger, but also that I’ve lost the need to identify with the artists I listened to and read. Now that I no longer fantasize about being one of Kerouac’s characters or a young Lou Reed looking cool on stage, I’m free to enjoy the more subtle pleasures of, say, Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter and Richard Yates writing about the sorrows of an unsuccessful middle-aged writer.
I can imagine a young person resenting being told by someone in authority what is good and what is great. I wanted to know but also didn’t have the reading muscles. So the suggestions made by those my age, they hit home with me, esp. as not something read in school. And the books for young English students seem partially selected for their obviousness, their directness. Not to diminish their greatness but it feels diminished if the book is perceived as necessary common cultural experience, reading for enlightenment.
Subtelties in slower slighter works had to be pointed out to me at first, and then that becomes a more necessary pleasure of the reading experience.
Even further our different paths can, I’m ashamed to say, make me feel a bias against someone who hails a book like White Noise because, though the book is a great satire and an NBA winner, because I read it so long ago, when I was more wild, like that book, it seems less mature to me than the later books, and I wonder what DeLillo would say about it (has he?). And I imagine this is why Chuck P is so popular with younger readers.
But age can also take away, as DG says, one can settle. And you forget so much.
My tastes have changed but I still only listen to The Smiths. Weird.
I’m finding that taste aligns with experience and worldview, in many cases we gravitate toward what validates them, taste and preference at least pushes us forward and informs and at most models and molds the art we produce, we can’t help but absorb influences and modulate them. I saw the original Patti Smith Group a number of times and also saw many first generation punk and glam groups in the mid and late seventies and I can’t overstate how radical and shocking this all was. The music scene was saturated with big tour progressive rock and summer of love rock from the sixties where the primary aesthetic was technical musicianship and virtuosity (“Patti Smith can’t sing!”) The reaction to the stripped down underground form becoming very popular, destroying and taking over, was aggressive to outright violent. We moved from the long haired sixties look to the greaser/punk look and got all the girls so were chased down and beaten up regularly for it. It’s the job of youth to find and show the shock of the new, invent, tear up and start over, but as you build a stake in the world it seems the tendency is toward wanting to understand and order it. I’m re-reading classic work now in (early, ha) middle age, books I just despised in school, and looking at these lit sites to see what’s what. Most of my friends are buying expensive sports cars (?) as if…
Van Morrison literally strikes a chord in me, ditto Karl Wallinger. I never tire of hearing them, but do go for extended periods of time without listening to either. I love discovering new bands, even new genres of music. Last week i discovered Rahim AlHaj and Iraqui music at one of the most moving concerts I’ve attended in a while. I tend not to re-read books, or to see movies more than once, there’s just too many new ones to read and watch. I guess the thing that most delights me, at age 55, is that there is still so much yet to discover and that I can still find art of all kinds that excites me.
I think most people on a moment-to-moment basis throughout their lives have an unflinching certainty in what they are as being already representative, as being enough. I think the different ways we identify ourselves–young, female, chinese, green grocer–are the rocks on which we build this certainty, and that this certainty is most vulnerable (even almost absent) when the old inexorables are reproaching one rock or another, or we ourselves are vaulting between two rocks in the river just wide enough apart that you cannot step the distance. I think because the young take in so much in so brief a time it’s hard not to believe you have met some capacity by the time you hit what feels like an outward limit. When this illusion is broken down it will only facilitate the next illusion; by feeling that you have finally arrived past your own illusions, you have a continual sense of arrival which is both false and a mentally sound way of approaching inner evolution.
The young are more certain than most because still within their first illusion, an unfallen world; the old are more certain than most because the broken forms of their illusions are more numerous on their fields than in others, and some of them have even at this point stopped bothering to foster new ones.
I think this process accounts for a lot of transitions in our taste: our illusions as youths are generally less nuanced than they will be later, so they can lend themselves to less nuanced versions of themselves in books, clothes, what have you. The process proceeds. That being said, I think one of the things art can be used as is an escape hatch; it’s one of the things you use to help undermine the excruciating self-consciousness which comes upon you when you’re outside of the process, and it can sustain you until you have evolved into a more tempered version of this self-consciousness, the tenuous poise of the self. Most of us, though, at some point between the excruciation and the poise, either regress or stall.
I remember when I was a kid I didn’t like any poetry, and I didn’t read fiction, and the first poem which changed my idea of poetry was a Shelley number, “When the lamp is shattered”. Now I don’t think, now that I’m further along, that this poem has been reduced in stature to the idiot I was when I first found it: I do not even love it for different reasons, just more of them. If the art does not grow with you, it will be forgotten. Art is there, at its best, to be wider. Wider than us, and wide out to the limits of width. I don’t think all art has to be so, and I don’t think most of it is, but you can follow art through widths, and I think it’s one way to facilitate personal growth without relying on the instinctual system of illusion; the worst of us make art accessories to our own illusions.
I need food, now. Dickens is X.
it’s such a post and such comments which make me feel grateful to be peering into this world: all these impressive minds working out fears and hopes with art, through art, even becoming as art in method and way of seeing. ever wider, like NLY says, and in that width different minds kind of sparking together for an instant, like they have here. a great read, thanks.
to temper the sincerity of this comment, i now have to go work off a hangover.
thanks alan, and everyone, for such thoughtful response. i feel better and excited. and now i will go work on tomorrow’s hangover.
Re. Leonard: I saw him last year, in Ireland, performing at Lissadell House in County Sligo. Cohen is a big fan of Yeats, who wrote extensively about that setting. It was very special: poet contre poet. I agree with you that his set is VERY polished, but I still spent the entire concert – over four hours – sort of fitfully weeping. I’m not sure why; maybe it was all that relished regret in his voice; songs of innocence & experience, etc.
Also, something worth thinking about: The (acclaimed) writer Claire Keegan has said that she didn’t learn to read – properly read – until she was 30.
“Now I don’t think, now that I’m further along, that this poem has been reduced in stature to the idiot I was when I first found it: I do not even love it for different reasons, just more of them. If the art does not grow with you, it will be forgotten. Art is there, at its best, to be wider. Wider than us, and wide out to the limits of width.”
wow that is so true