The older I get the more clearly I see things, I never understood when I was young – barely a teenager, then barely a man – how unhappy life made me. Now that I’m a pensioner I search for ways to alleviate the pain of existence of a world where there is little effort made to know why events unfold the way they do. It seems to me, now, that there is an unending supply of suffering and that everyone is putting all their effort into alleviating the resulting pain apart from the obvious, which is to be kind. Why we cannot do so seems to lie squarely in the lap of the gods.
We fear them so we don’t risk being kind to those around us, it’s too dangerous to put on the line the small guaranteed source of pleasure we might have at any given moment. Better to seek out more pleasure, even more, even more.
Even now life gives me reasons to hate it. When I was young I was an actor, trying to fit in because, having seen what life had done to my brother, who was bullied at school, it was safer to run with a pack. I was so good at deceiving those around me that, when I not so long ago said how unhappy I was when I was at school, someone from those days unfollowed me on Facebook.
Is that the right word, “unfollowed”? Is it not “unfriended”? I don’t think either word is accurate, there is nothing remotely friendly about social media, the way that people conduct themselves, although it has helped me to understand the species. It frightens me.
In fact James was once my friend but on Facebook he was something else, just a participant in an endless evolving costume drama where we package ourselves for public consumption like directors on a fashion shoot. Our public personae have little to do with our real selves, so Facebook is profiting from the same fear that caused the Cranbrook boys to mercilessly persecute my beloved brother – who was always to good to me – and that causes people on Twitter to say the most appalling things about journalists, people they don’t know but whom they patronise inexcusably when they don’t say the right things. They want the reporters, show hosts, weathermen, interviewers, and other professionals, people with years of experience, to be performing monkeys mouthing platitudes that satisfy a community grown accustomed to the mediocrity of Netflix and Stan. They don’t want the truth, they want the same comforting lies that make people post pictures of glasses of wine, on a table, in a restaurant, with a pleasant backdrop framing the whole. Along with the quick line of carefully composed text the image says, “Envy me.”
I didn’t go to the recent school reunion (delayed by Covid, it should’ve been held two years ago) partly because of James’ actions but also because I didn’t want to stand in a room full of loud men – grown up children, really – boasting about what they’d achieved in life.
I have better things to do with my time so in my old age I am devoting my life to the thing that was taken away from me when I was 17, which is art. I have time now to do what I want, time that I should’ve had during the 25 years I worked in offices, but that my school and my father – both of whom should’ve known better than to tempt fate, because their actions almost destroyed me – deprived me of, out of a sense that the world doesn’t care about art.
I think it does but it needs to be told what is good, whereas I have never needed such instruction, having an innate curiosity that enabled me to understand what was good and what was merely fashion. It’s even better now that I’m ageing. Old enough to start forgetting why I entered a room, though not quite old enough to go out without my socks on. Still young enough to fear.
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