Aren’t I too young to be nostalgic for youth? So you’d think, so you’d think. And all the odder to have that feeling inspired most by things that weren’t really part of my adolescence…
See, despite the ubiquity of the single and video for “Buddy Holly” some ten years ago, I’ve only just gotten my hands on the whole of Weezer‘s first album. (Given the general shape of my musical taste, this might seem surprising, but at the time it came out, I was on the cusp of my early-NiN/industrial phase and my Phish-are-the-greatest-geniuses-of-all-time hippie phase, with the transistion between them rather more rapid than you’d think possible.) Anyway, the album in general, but the geek-anthem In the Garage in particular, evoked the same response I had to Ender’s Game and Heathers, both of which I encountered only in college: why the hell wasn’t I into this when I was 13? Not that all of the above aren’t still perfectly good works, but they all would’ve had more resonance—and probably done me more good—five or ten years earlier.
That got me thinking about people I now know: What if I’d met him or her a decade ago, when we were all probably so much more silly and serious and crazy and undamaged? (I suppose this doesn’t work as well for the considerable chunk of friends and acquaintances who would’ve been about my age now when I was a high school freshman, but let that pass.)
“Good lord,” you may be thinking, “two years out of college and still locked into some Peter Pan refusal to grow up?” Or, alternatively, “A midlife crisis at 24?” Well, no, not so much. At least, I hope not. “Nostalgia” shouldn’t be taken to imply that I find the thought of actually being 13 again anything but nightmarish. Still, I do keep thinking of something my mother told me a few years back. I was maybe two or three, and she and my grandmother had taken me out for a walk around Christmastime, when we passed a house with the front trees and bushes decked out in your standard array of plain white lights. “Oh!” (I’m told I exclaimed) “Isn’t it wonderful?” And, of course, it wasn’t… not to them, anyway, since it’s hard to get terribly excited about a strand of little light bulbs from K-Mart after the first few times.
And so it is in general, a pattern that no number of mawkish Robin Williams movies reminding us that every moment is a unique and precious snowflake can combat in any lasting way. If Maria Callas rose from the grave to do one last encore with Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting, it still wouldn’t stick in my head like that first Rigoletto dad coaxed me out to at twelve. However much I may dig some new band I’ve discovered, it’s not going to be quite like that first time I put on Sgt. Pepper’s or (and I cringe slightly at this one now) get me as psyched as “The Only Time” blasting on headphones as I stalked down the linoleum hallways (all that same public school faded-green) in the denim jacket with the black Circle-A patch. (Yes, really.) There are surely plenty of books sitting on my shelf now that are orders of magnitude better than Illuminatus!, but I’ll probably remember evenings by the fireplace eagerly flipping those pages more clearly than any of the (doubtless better crafted) novels I’ll read this year.
In short, you don’t get to have formative experiences as often once you’re more-or-less formed. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood, but even if you take the one less traveled you give up the luxury of standing at the fork imagining where each might lead. You wake up one day, and it occurs to you that you’ve more or less become the man you’re going to be from now on, and you’d better hope that you like him OK.
And the reason that all this self-indulgent prattle is touched off by Weezer or Ender’s Game rather than, you know, the things I was actually listening to and reading at age 13, is that those aren’t remembered at that first moment of discovery anymore, but as things that became familiar parts of my life. You don’t form a specific memory around a song you heard three times a week for two years. Or, if you do, it’s tied to elements of memory at once more general and more concrete—the people you were spending time with, the places where you hung out. It’s those rare occasions when you encounter something new that you all at once realize you should have liked then that you recapture that sense of becoming something—becoming the person you’re going to be. We’re all always still doing that, of course, but it’s more touch up work now than the broad brushstrokes—no big, splashy Jackson Pollock thrills of tossing great buckets of red or blue on a blank canvas. (Would we really want it otherwise? I imagine wholesale personal transformation can be inconvenient, especially if you do happen to think the fellow you are now is halfway decent.)
None of this is meant as some great Prufrockian lament, really. Just an observation about a strange feeling these things can induce… the vertiginous awareness of being someone definite, you might call it. Or anyway, someone definite seeming—there are few recipes for embarassment as sure as predicting who and what you’ll be in a decade.
Addendum: I recalled belatedly that I’d picked up Maladroit when it came out and forgotten about it after a few listens… and playing it again I see why. What on earth happened to this band after Pinkerton?
