'Incipient Opportunity'

My sons are living in Westchester County, Maryland and Peru. All are employed and self-reliant and have successfully enacted a young man’s timeless ritual: leaving home. I left home at seventeen, never to return except for brief visits. I haven’t lived in Cleveland, my birthplace, since 1977 or Ohio since 1983. The contrast with my late brother is striking. He lived within a ten-mile radius his entire life.  Then I think of my paternal grandfather, born in Poland in 1896, shipping early in the new century to the U.S., naturalized as an American citizen in 1920, working for more than thirty years as an ironworker in Cleveland. 

Conversely, I know men, some in early middle age, who still live in their parents’ homes, often in the basement or boyhood bedroom. I can’t imagine doing that. No doubt there are legitimate economic or medical explanations in some cases but I would have felt humiliated, a failure. As a kid, what I most wanted was to be a grownup, independent and self-reliant. 

 

On this date, November 24, in 1965, Philip Larkin, as a break from working on one of his masterpieces, “High Windows,” completed the poem “How Distant”:

 

“How distant, the departure of young men

Down valleys, or watching

The green shore past the salt-white cordage

Rising and falling.

 

“Cattlemen, or carpenters, or keen

Simply to get away

From married villages before morning,

Melodeons play

 

“On tiny decks past fraying cliffs of water

Or late at night

Sweet under the differently-swung stars,

When the chance sight

 

“Of a girl doing her laundry in the steerage

Ramifies endlessly.

This is being young,

Assumption of the startled century

 

“Like new store clothes,

The huge decisions printed out by feet

Inventing where they tread,

The random windows conjuring a street.”

 

In the English context, young men throughout the century left villages and farms to seek work in the cities. The migration took place all over the industrialized world—getting away from the “married villages.” This hints at muted autobiography from the eternal bachelor Larkin. As Larkin’s biographer James Booth puts it, “incipient opportunity.”