'The Silly, Trivial Things You Did When Young'

“Of course, you live life forward and think about it backwards.” 

I’ve spent the last month or so thinking about the summer of 1973, when I visited Europe for the first time. This retrospective was prompted by my youngest son, who graduated in May from Rice University and the following day flew to Bangkok. He and friends have visited ten countries, from Cambodia to Turkey to Croatia. He’ll fly from Italy today and return to the U.S. on Wednesday. I spent most of my summer fifty-two years ago in France, usually in Paris or the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, with brief side trips to Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium.

 

I was twenty and my son is twenty-one and far more mature and sophisticated than I was. Much was lost on me, less on him. In a pleasing piece of symmetry, he’s reading my old copy of Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which I carried around Europe and read for the first time that summer along with Spinoza’s Ethics. The headlines on French newspapers were dominated by Watergate and the marital shenanigans of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In that less globalized world, the only Anglophone songs I remember hearing were Paul Simon’s “Love Me Like a Rock” and George Harrison’s “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).” Everywhere I saw posters for Pink Floyd’s tour. Airline hijackings by terrorists were fashionable and for the first time I saw policemen in airports carrying machine guns. I ate snails for the first and last time, and horsemeat, once.

 

One of the pleasures of having children is sifting through the aspects of personality they share with you and those they lack. I’m not looking for a clone. On the whole, my sons are jumbles of me, my wife and qualities out of left field, and I find that surprisingly gratifying. None possesses my severest failings. The observation at the top is taken from an interview the American poet Howard Nemerov gave The Massachusetts Review in 1981. Nemerov continues:

 

“You might spend a lot of time in embarrassment about the silly, trivial things you did when young, that you didn't know you were doing silly trivial things when you were old too. You know, there is a beautiful place in Proust where the painter Elstir talks to Marcel about this. Marcel has just discovered that this great master must have been the silly young man who was referred to at parties, and Elstir, instead of turning away and refusing ever to see him again, sets him down and gives him a little talk about growing up and about how it’s only nonentities who have nothing to be ashamed of in their past, how you have to overcome what you were before, and it’s only, he says, in this way that something a little above the common life of the atelier is achieved.”