Dear Diary: Developmental
In a few hours, Will O’Neill will be three weeks old. Next week, when I hope to see him for the third time, he’ll be four weeks old, but not yet a month. I expect that the counting in weeks will end when he’s three months old, and that counting in months will end sometime between his eighteenth and his twenty-fourth. From then until his early teens, half-years will be noted. There’s something self-contradictory about saying “thirteen and a half”; it sounds like the kind of puffing that cool kids don’t go in for.
So much is known of Will’s future, and not much more. He has not announced any plans so far, and his parents have nothing more definite (and limiting) than health and safety in mind for his coming years. When will intimations of his future begin to present themselves? Will we recognize them? These are open questions, too. Looking back on my own life, I see a complete break with childhood round about 1961. I stopped playing in the basement (I had already stopped playing with trains), and I started reading, preferably by candlelight. Beyond the odd Hardy Boys mystery, I hadn’t been a reader; that changed with A Tale of Two Cities. I began singing, too, in the chorus at school, and almost instantly I knew all about Mozart and Vivaldi. Not to mention the Water Music, which provided the soundtrack for Dickens. Overnight, I became a pompous jerk. For the most part, I’ve spent the rest of my life filling in the pretentious gas of my own private Big Bang with material experience.
What also strikes me is the totality with which my new preoccupation with music, literature, and history — my abiding interests to this day — sublimated sexuality for me. Stendhal wrote that people wouldn’t fall in love if they didn’t read about it first, but even then, although I had a few monumental crushes that went nowhere (because, among other reasons, I was constituted like one of the denizens of Pleasantville), I didn’t think about making love, myself, in spite of reading rather a lot about it. Sex, like sports, was for other people. I’m quite sure that I should have grown up to be a forty year-old virgin if I had not, at some convenient point in my college career, been taken by the hand.
More important than sex, though, was the awakening that came on a day in 1974 or ’75, during my Houstonian exile. I was on the Westheimer bus, going one way or the other between work (Post Oak) and home (Montrose). I was reading Anthony Trollope’s An Autobiography. I don’t recall the passage, but it said the very same thing as Rilke’s archaic torso. It was time to stop being a shambolic solipsist. It was time to start being a gentleman. I felt like Adam and Eve being thrown out of Eden. But it wasn’t paradise that was taken away; it was only childhood. I cleaned up my act. I got myself through law school and into the New York Bar.Â
After that, it was a simple matter of waiting for Al Gore to invent the Internet.
Will is only three weeks old, but, doubtless as a doting grandfather, I’m sure that it’s not going to take him to the end of his twenties to grow up. Whether or not Will knows what he wants to do with his life by the time he’s thirty is another matter altogether. If my experience is any guide, you can’t find out what you want to do with your life until you claim it as an adult; you can’t take real advantage of passing opportunities if you are not already conducting your affairs — and I don’t mean just checkbooks — with diligence and the conviction that what’s really interesting about life is going on all around you.