Weekend Update: On the Young
When my aunt called, I said that Kathleen and I had just gotten back from One Day University. My aunt did not ask what One Day University was. She said, “Oh, I’d like to go to that so much!” — or enthusiastic words to that effect. It killed me (as if often does), that my aunt lives in New Hampshire, and not here in New York City. True, she lives in a deep pocket of high culture. Also, she is perfectly happy there, and has been for years. It’s entirely likely, by the way, that Il y a longtemps que je t’aime will show in a theatre nearby. Nearby her, in the middle of the Monadnock Mountains. She said as much when I told her how much I’d loved the movie, which I did in response to her faux question about Kristin Scott Thomas: “Have you seen your lover-girl yet?” My aunt knew that I had tickets to see The Seagull, but her eyes do not allow her to track my every burp on the Internet, so she could be excused for not knowing whether I’d seen the play. Like the hormonal teenager that, in fact, I never was at the time, I rushed right over the Broadway show to say that I’d seen the movie, “which opened yesterday!” As though my aunt might pin a medal on my chest for cultural diligence. Have I forgotten to tell you how crazy I am about my aunt? New York is the poorer for her absence. In my heart I am still about fourteen and she is in her early thirties. Octavian’s crush on the Marshallin was about half the size. But now I’m sixty — so I don’t stammer.
Ordinarily, when my aunt and I talk, we are both home alone, but today, having just got home from ODU, Kathleen was on the premises as well, so I put her on the phone. At some point, we asked if my aunt had heard a certain bit of news. She hadn’t. “But I’m completely desensitized,” she said, “to the communication skills of younger people” — by which she meant that younger people have no discernible communication skills. Kathleen said, “We were brought up very differently, weren’t we?” and for that instant my aunt and I belonged to the same generation. “We were indeed,” she said.
As usual, One Day University’s program consisted of four one-hour lectures. Three of the professors were very explicit about the pleasure of speaking to an audience familiar with such references as “Nixon,” “Glass-Steagall,” and the fact, that, once upon a time, there was only one phone company, and that you rented your telephone from this telephone company, which is why it always worked. Fear not: I am not going to launch into my “Prowst” lecture. That’s the one in which I indignantly demand that Dartmouth reimburse my aunt’s grandson (M le Neveu) for having failed to teach him how to pronounce a great French writer’s name. The anecdote on which this lecture is built never fails to shock the people to whom I tell it. They know that my cousin is brilliant, so it can’t be his fault. How did he get through one of the premier liberal arts colleges without so much as knowing that it’s “Proost”?
The last lecturer of the day — Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore — actually came out and said that he finds that today’s students don’t work as hard as their predecessors because they have so much more other stuff to figure out. The lecture began with a reminder of the world that most of the audience grew up in: When Mr Schwartz became an adult, the question wasn’t whether he’d get married, or whether he’d have children. The answers to those non-questions, both of them, was “As soon as possible.” The only genuine question was whom he’d marry — and he had the grace to point out that there was no question that this partner would be a woman. I suspect that Mr Schwartz and I would agree that, even if we were given all the options in the world, we’d still have been happy with the women who consented to marry us. But we were lucky. Lots of people were miserable when it came time to deal with the marriage question, and that’s why it’s a good thing that there are more choices today.
Which would mean that things are great if it weren’t for a slippage problem: undergraduates have to think about having sex. You could say, they’re allowed to have sex. Lord knows, we weren’t. “We were brought up very differently.” You might dream all the time about “scoring,” but it was just that, a dream. Meanwhile, you read your Shakespeare. And your Proust. You would not have known what to do with a hookup if the girl had knocked on your dormitory door. All right, you would have known. But only short-term: you’d have handled the matter like an Edwardian roué. The deeper connections would have been off-limits. And she, of course, would have been Germaine Greer. Rocket science.
When I was growing up, my aunt was the only adult I knew who had anything to say to me. She was beautiful, intelligent, romantic, and the mother of four children. (She is still all of these things.) I am sure that she had a great deal to do with my falling in love with Kathleen. By which I mean, not that I fell in love with Kathleen because she’s just like my aunt (although she sort of is), but because my aunt taught me what I might hope for in a partner. Without that example, I might have lived my life alone.
Instead of which, I haven’t lived the life of the prickly autodidact that I probably deserved.