Literature and Nostalgia

 IT was very jarring to hear that a few friends of mine were totally not interested in literature. And I remembered why I never volunteered to like literature: because I didn't want a situation where my teacher and I were the only ones who cared about literature. She's not a terrible person, but very prickly and hard to open up to emotionally. Imagine what it'd have been like if I found people around me with whom I could bond – I had one or two really good friends, but I have cultural barriers with them.

I knew people who were very active in mathematics and literature, and they followed these paths in life. What if I had been as active as them? We didn't live in a time of empowerment. There was a lot of great things that did happen back then, but there wasn't a whole deal of learning how to work with people, and that was a great omission. In fact, when I graduated from secondary school, I had an A2, and I thought that it was a very fair result, given that it's the best you can aspire to without taking a real leadership position.

The sense of wonder that only literature could bring: that was an undeniably awesome aspect of what I went through. But it did put me out of sync with my classmates. I always thought of them as careerists, and I avoided them because of that. It wasn't fair, but teenage guys are so unfairly biased.

At the same time, I look back on those years, and feel myself so distant from them. Yes, literature meant so much to me, but its importance waned year by year. If I had gone down this path, I'm at a stage of my life when I would be collecting career recognition instead of dreaming of what could have been. I'm done looking back at past glories. I promised myself that I could never rehash those things I did in my youth, and that I would have to look for new things. But shortly after that my life fell apart.

One of the biggest problems with the way that people treated literature is that on some level it was a signalling thing. It was a signaller of prestige and intelligence: look, I'm smart and profound enough to have known all of this. But it's also about having some kind of a soul, and being able to empathise with the work, with people. And that wasn't really talked about enough.

How have you changed? How do you allow yourself to change?

I was very stubborn when I was younger. I flip flopped between being an INTP and an INFP, and these are people who create some kind of inner life, some kind of alternate reality, and live in that. It is a superpower when I was a child, but it could make you resistant to growing up. Because it made me resist external stimuli and change. It was nice and fun to be living in a dream world, and in a way literature was facilitating that dream world. But it did not put me in the mindset where things were constantly moving forward, that you were always in some struggle to outpace your competitors. It was a world where things were given to me, and I accepted things. But was it a world where I figured out what I wanted to do, and learnt to negotiate and adapt and move forward with life?

In order to move on, move ahead in life, I have to unlearn a lot of the passivity that I picked up at school. A lot of the sullen rebelling against the status quo because they were pushing me in directions that I did not like.

And I have to pick apart teenage rebellion – is it conservatism or is it radicalism? Is teenage rebellion about resistance to change, or is it about wanting to change too quickly? Because we put all rebellious behaviour into the same bucket, we risk conflating together these two completely different impulses.

It's true that you have to move forward with your life so much, so there's such a need to learn how to breathe and grow and just allow things to take you along and go along for the ride. Midlife is such a challenging time: because of the two pressures of looking backwards and looking forwards. It is the period of time where all the action is – not always the best time for contemplating and dreaming. A time for just doing and executing and maybe losing sight of the bigger picture. It is not a rehearsal. It is the real thing.

Midlife is a time of saying goodbye to yesterday. Perhaps adolescence is that way too, and this is pretty hard for people like me who resist change. Things will close in on you. Life is no longer carefree. You no longer had a few luxuries that you used to have. It is more difficult to retain the old because the memories of your youth are fading away. And it is more difficult to embrace the new, because the thrill of the novel has worn off, and because it's more difficult to change your mindset.

How do I retain what is good about the past and let go of whatever's left? How do I pick the lessons that I have to learn, and and let go of what I need to let go of? How do I adapt and change to what I need to be in the future?

I sensed that getting rid of the last remnants of adolescent mentality was going to be quite difficult for me. I'm a person who's too child-like for that.

Literature was something that spoke to the dreamer in me. I spent hours, days, immersed in the lives, even the inner lives of people who had nothing to do with me. Was it as a form of escapism, or was it to connect more with the people around me? And now I see that it's the hard nosed ones, the ones who never “got” literature – who have gotten ahead in life.

Literature offers consolation for the heartbroken. But maybe the ones who never got their hearts broken in the first place are the truly strong ones... at least they are the ruthless ones, who go for what they want and get it.

If I were to get back into contact with the people who I associated with in my youth, is it because of nostalgia, because I like being with them again, or is it because they are useful social contacts? I remember my classmates, and I remember the literature lessons, and the crazy thing is that these two things don't really overlap.