Like Waltzing or Horseback Riding

I’ve a few friends who read.  Most people younger than a certain age seem to have given up.  They’re happy to talk about movies or television shows or perhaps send a link to an article.  But books seem to be increasingly seen as an anachronism like waltzing or horseback riding.

The friends I have who do read are therefore important.  If someone has recommended something worthy one time, I am very interested to revisit the discussion with them again, the next time we talk.  “What have you read?”  A time or two back, down in Shanghai, having a smoothie there, up over the former French concession, a dear friend mentioned a book I finished today: “Call Me By Your Name” by Andrew Aciman.  I dutifully threw it on my Amazon list and ordered it with eight or so other books on my last swing through the U.S.

Literature, can work like an absolution.  To spend convincing time with someone else’s passions, someone else’s shame, another person’s means of marking time, untangles the fetters in one’s own head, that otherwise seem so absolute and vexing.  We spend one hundred pages in Elio’s mind, savoring his unrealized infatuation for Oliver where a shoulder rub or a foot touch is seismic. 

I thought of Seneca the stoic who has something to say about both the bitter and the merciful way the passions of youth dissipate; wistful but grateful that one is no longer surging with hormones.   I never shared Elio’s passions, let alone post-doctoral knowledge of humanities or a summer in the Italian sun, as a seventeen-year-old.  But I was a seventeen-year-old, when desire was all consuming. Indeed, I have a seventeen-year-old living here in this house, and I thought of my older one, as I considered Elio’s world. 

Napping I awoke and read some more.  My wife joined me in bed and asked me about the book.  “Why don’t you read me a few pages aloud.”  I did so willingly.  And Elio and Oliver were most assuredly beyond the pre-coital phase of the novel.   I didn’t pause to explain the scene with the peach, just kept reading, till she dozed off, considering their passion and ours. 

Sunday 11/22/18