A very little over a week ago, I was standing in the balcony of the 9:30 Club watching The National. It was the fourth time I've seen them play live, and the only time in a sold-out space. We had stood in a long line, waiting to get in, listening to the couple in front of us talk about Rod Blagojevich (you can't escape people chewing over politics anywhere in Washington D.C.) then swelling into the club, after bag checks and hand stamps, shoulder to shoulder with other seeking bodies.
It was a good show - The National always puts on a solid show - and we met some friends, and it was nice to see them and the chiaroscuro people in the crowd - many singing along with all the songs, a little bit of love in their faces. And looking at all these people, I realized that most of them were about my age (30), give or take a few years. The guys on stage were about my age, give or take few years, and the songs they were playing were about people my age, give or take a few years. And seeing all this, I suddenly understood that I am on the edge of an ending moment. The number of bands that I have left to see in sticky-floored clubs singing songs about me and people like me in a sardine-packed crowd is coming to an end. The bands are getting younger and people my age are getting less willing to stand shoulder to shoulder and shout lyrics and spill beer all over each other and feel alive by being one among many. My moment being part of the current of now is trailing away.
It made me think of the summer after I graduated high school. You have the great formality that is commencement to officially alert you that Your Adult Life Is About To Start, but the summer that follows is a thresholding space, a time soaked in the awareness of change and suffused in unknown possibilities. It's the last, formalized generational moment - almost everyone gets there and goes through it at the same time. College commencement four or five years later is already a kind of dilution - a certain percentage of souls have already spun off, wandering satellites in irregular orbits created by the gravitational pull of their own life events.
Still, that last summer day capped and gowned - college graduation - is the end, the very end, of formal timelines. Any sort of forward motion afterwards is idiosyncratic and chaotic, endlessly variable and subject to change. From that point on, sharing group life events is a vanishingly small numbers game. Everyone is alone to find or miss what mile markers they may - careers, relationships, children, houses - whenever they happen to stumble upon them. The group march is over, and everyone staggers off to travel their own path.
So standing in the club last week, watching the band play and watching the crowd watch, in the peculiar particular way a crowd can watch when the band onstage is singing specifically for them, I had the sensation of stumbling against an unexpected object. It felt weirdly important, a sort of sharp jab in the ribs by some noodling cosmic finger alerting me that the days do run like rabbits and I cannot conquer time, and it felt a little bit heart-twisting, because I now know how rare that singular feeling of collective generational experience is, and how increasingly rare it will be.
Adulthood comes, whether you will or no.
(I'm interested in the last words of direction that are given at the doorway to the adult world, the benedictions and warnings and admonitions and inspirations heaped down by the older and wiser on the captive audiences at the gates: specifically, commencement speeches. So all this week I will be posting excerpts and links to some of my favorite ones. I'd like to hear what you think so I will be enabling comments in case you feel inclined to add your two cents.)
the last band
traveling home
Fortunately, my trip won't be as long as this one.
Astrophotographer Thierry Legault's photo of the Space Shuttle Atlantis crossing in front of the sun, taken on May 12, 2009.
giant among giants
I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March.
slashing with his pen
I opened A Book of Prejudices and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.Richard Wright on H.L. Mencken
Photo by Irving Penn of H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, 1947.
american in every pulse-beat, snort and adenoid
Find a writer who is indubitably an American in every pulse-beat, snort and adenoid, an American who has something new and peculiarly American to say and who says it in an unmistakable American way and nine times out of ten you will find that he has some sort of connection with the gargantuan and inordinate abattoir by Lake Michigan.H. L. Mencken
Aerial view of Chicago with Lake Michigan by Stephen Wiltshire.
a place of tall buildings
The Home Insurance Building, widely considered to be the first skyscraper. Designed by William LeBaron Jenney and built in Chicago in 1884.
it is not paris and buttermilk
I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.H.L. Mencken
The Social Science Research Committee maps created by The Chicago School sociologists are fascinating. This one shows the city's population density in 1930.
this weekend
Venturing forth:
- fun times and free beer in Collinwood
- may-hem
- garden sale
- Les Triplettes de Belleville and Mishima
- internal compasses
Image from here.
the optimist conspectus
The Optimist Conspectus: a compendium of contemporary optimism:
I can think of no divining rod more aptly suited to sussing out the nature of an individual than the measure of his or her optimism. In the answer lie clues to values, aspirations and fears rarely revealed through questions of a more direct nature.Ian Fitzpatrick, March, 2009
By the same measure, the picture painted by our collective optimism is a dense and revealing one; a view of those things to which we commonly aspire, and a glimpse into the distinctions between us - which are quite often far different than those purported to exist.
(You can submit your own reasons for optimism here.)
joy and woe are woven fine
Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.George Vaillant, Adaptation to Life
Amazing reading: an article by Joshua Wolf Shenk about the men of the Grant Study - a 72 year, ongoing longitudinal analysis of 268 Harvard men largely overseen by Dr. George Vaillant. The purpose of the study was to try and uncover some sort of formula for what makes a good life.
Photo from Square America.
a place together
When someday Sean and I have our own house, I want it to feel like this - light and spare, but homey.
Converted barn from OWI photographed by Vercruysse Frederik. Via Roseland Greene.
how to stop being lazy
Good to know: You can't expect it to happen overnight.
(Wiki-how is so useful.)
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