2010: On A Whim And A Prayer

Nick Carraway, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s erstwhile narrative conscience in ‘The Great Gatsby’, remarks that he is “the most honest man”. In the context of that novel, that remarkable study of intimate personal feelings and unfathomably large, continental ideologies, he might well be right. J. D. Salinger, however, can surely lay claim to the most truthful remark in modern literature. Again uttered through the author’s choric voice, Holden Caulfield, in ‘The Catcher In The Rye’, tells us to “never tell anybody anything. If you do you only start missing everyone.”

This is significant, I feel, as we fast approach another new year. The world is smaller than it has ever been, split into manageable pieces by modern technology and communications, allowing us near-constant links to every corner of the globe from any far-flung destination. We live in exciting times, a social media revolution that means we are never more than one click, one touch-screen, away from a multitude of communication forms. Of-course, to say that we communicate does not mean the same as saying we connect.

It is interesting how relevant Salinger’s viewpoint is in the final moments of 2010 and the embryonic stages of 2011. We can now “tell anybody anything” across a number of platforms, from Facebook to Twitter, Skype to Foursquare, Blackberry Messenger to Whatsapp. As information disseminates at an increasingly rapid pace, we find ourselves opining, narrating, articulating and displaying our lives to all and sundry, even if that is not the sole intention of our various publications. Go back through your Facebook posts from the past twelve months. You have, whether you wanted to or not, kept a diary. Despite this, it may be that you are able to enter into a dialogue with our modernity without becoming embroiled in the psychosomatic elements of it. I have never been quite so stoic. No. For me, Salinger is correct. The more I tell people, the more I miss them. Yet still I tell and still I miss.

This poses a problem. Does one shut up shop in 2011 and retreat to an earlier, perhaps a more innocent and simpler time? Do we compartmentalise our conscious and subconscious communiqués into the general and random on the one hand, and the specific on the other – Facebook status updates and 147-character Tweets that say very little to many or so much to someone? I’m minded to adopt the stance of Alfieri from Miller’s ‘A View From The Bridge’ and settle for half. Will I like that better?

Would I do it differently if offered the chance? Ultimately that is the wrong question. Could I do it differently? That would be more appropriate. And no, I could not. I like that this year I have taken chances, run risks, stared fate in the face. My decisions and, indeed, indecisions may not have all worked out perfectly. There is, however, in the midst of the paranoia of another year passed and potentially wasted, comfort in our certain uncertains: that everything changes and nothing changes. Nick Hornby had it right in ‘Fever Pitch’: “If you lose the FA Cup Final in May, there’s always the third round to look forward to in January. And what’s wrong with that? It’s sort of comforting when you think about it.”

So how was 2010 for you? Was it everything you wished for? Did the feeling you had this time last year turn in to an impressive premonition of what was to come, or were your hopes and fears misguided and unfounded, arising as they did out of the inevitable emotional firestorm of alcohol and an acute awareness of the rapid passing of time? I’ll look back on 2010 as a year of utter chaos, of dizzying highs and sadly predictable lows. In the space of twelve bizarre months, I’ve started a job of at times oppressing intensity, travelled to the southern United States on what can only be described as a whim and a prayer, watched my sister get married, observed a political revolution in the UK and searched in earnest for an apartment to call my own. The above list, of-course, is hardly indicative of the entirety of a twelve months. You get the general idea. I could delve further here, could provide you with unique personal insights. Without wanting to sound either esoteric or deliberately annoying, what I can tell you is that while the world around us has changed immeasurably in the past twelve months, I remain as I ever was and doubtless ever will be. There is something both monumentally frightening and consoling about that in equal measure.

If Salinger is right, if it is true that opening up to people you care about only results in missing them terribly, is it best to remain closed off and private, despite the near impossibility of this in our world of omnipresent communications? ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ has often reared its head this year, both in terms of its last-line conundrum, but also in its overriding motif: that there are some of us who are lost in the world, not entirely certain of which way we are going or which way we have come, and at times merely wanting, for want of a better thing to do, to stand in a field and catch people coming out of the rye and heading for a fall.

John Lennon, in probably his finest lyric, remarked that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”. So, in all honesty, I have not been able to be the catcher in the rye for all that long. Moreover, and perhaps here is the only way that the idea of Holden Caulfield being a catcher in the rye matches up with his epitaph of missing everyone, it seems that to catch people in the way Salinger describes it, the people in question have to want to be caught.

Perhaps that is the greatest lesson of 2010. You can tell people everything in the hope of absolution, of common ground, of love, life and the pursuit of happiness. Such displays of affection, honesty and attempts at the substance of what is hoped for will not always result in mutual understanding, warmth or candour. Neither will they stop you missing those who you communicate such messages to. And they certainly do not turn us into catchers in the rye.

Yet the alternative is not in my philosophy, and so I beat on, boat against an at times bewildering current, continually laying myself open to the dual onslaughts of sentiment and posterity, honesty and nostalgia. After all, you have to try. If you haven’t tried you haven’t lived.

You only live once. Doesn’t it go by in a blink?

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Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees;
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of the year.
What does he think of that?
I mean, what do I?
And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.

Frank O’Hara, ‘Meditations In An Emergency’.