I just started reading a novel by one of my favorite writers, Brian Morton, called Starting Out in the Evening. It's about three characters who are in very different places in their lives. Leonard Schiller is a 70-something year old writer who has written four novels and tends to live in the world of literature. Heather Wolfe is a 24-year-old graduate student who is writing her thesis about Schiller's work. And Ariel is Schiller's 39-year-old daughter who is still trying to find her place in the world.
As you might imagine, their outlook on life, and each other, is quite different and I'm fascinated by the way Morton uses this in the book. Early on, when Heather meets Leonard for the first time in a coffee shop to discuss her thesis, here's the way Morton describes it:
"She felt as if she were in the middle of an earthquake. The furniture in her mind was sliding around. Reading his work, she had always thought of him as a contemporary. In fact--as she'd known, of course, with her rational mind--he was closer to her grandparents' age. And though she'd entertained many imaginary pictures of him over the years, it had never occurred to her that he might be fat. To her mind, genius was gaunt."
Here was a guy whose writing helped her to understand herself better--the guy she'd chosen to write her thesis about--who didn't look at all the way she thought he should. Of course, she always knew that he was much, much older that she was, but she'd never come face to face with that fact. And it didn't really seem possible in her mind because he'd been able to speak directly to her personal situations through his writing, so much so that he had to be a contemporary.
Later in the book, we get a glimpse into the way Ariel sees her father, and it's quite different, but equally intriguing:
"Her father had been hiding out for thirty years in his writing room, thinking that the war of high culture versus low was still raging away. He hadn't gotten the news that the war was over: that high culture, which he had cherished, fought for, given his life for, had been crushed."
I haven't read far enough yet to know this for certain, but I bet he knows that high culture has been crushed. But rather than living in the low culture, which he doesn't really understand, he simply chose to creature a tiny environment in which he could enter high culture, so he could experience it any time he wants to.
For those who are middle-age, like I am, I think we tend to hang on to the familiar when everything around us is screaming "things are changing." We know they are changing; we even accept the fact that they are changing; but that doesn't mean we are going to give up everything we know. Instead, we create our own versions of Schiller's writing room and we hang out there once in a while, and everything seems right for a while.
