A peripatetic list of words I've looked up #4.
revanchism — the political policy of endeavoring to regain lost territory
I believe a large percentage of people — possibly most — feel as though they’ve wasted their lives. I know I do, sometimes. It’s a silly feeling for a 31-year-old man to have, but it’s ineluctable, particularly when I’m in the kind of mood I’ve been in lately: winter, the year ending, emotionally fragile over yet another fuckup in a long string of fuckups, all of which kind of have the same weird shape to them. What I’ve done with the last 31 years often feels as though it amounted to very little, and I often wish I could go back to the 18-year-old me and say, Don’t blow off Nicole, she was cool; to my 22-year-old self and say, There’s no reason that a career in public radio should be beyond your scope; to my 26-year-old self and say, Don’t buy a house a mile from where you grew up just because you don’t have any other ideas about what to do with your life. And a string of others, you know.
But let’s be honest: I’m young, and I’ve lived this way on purpose, at least partially because my father told me when I was young that I should never do what he did — marry too young, have a kid at 21, and spend the next 10 years slogging through the workaday life and not pursuing dreams that might have been available to him, otherwise.* Of course I’ve heard it from people much younger than I am, who seem to have convinced themselves that decisions they made at the age of 22 are going to have irrevocable echoes down the hallway of their life: well. I suppose that’s actually true, but I also think that the kind of regrets that my younger friends have about choices they made right out of college tend to overestimate how crippling those choices really were … at least as long as they weren’t the sort my father made, which they aren’t, at least not among my friends.
*I want to make two things very clear here: (1) I’m not the kid he had when he was 21, and my mother is not the woman he married then. It would be a much more fucked up thing to say to your son in that instance than it really was. (2) I don’t blame my father for anything. I made my own decisions.
No, it becomes much sadder — probably because it’s more legitimate — when you start hearing these things from older people. People cresting into middle age who feel like they’ve made all the wrong choices. This often results in a sort of spiritual revanchism: grown men acting like children because they failed to be children when they were younger. It’s simultaneously understandable and a little bit gross, which is why the old term for it — mid-life crisis — is one I don’t like. Honestly, it feels to me like an evacuation of responsibility, a sort of passive-voice way of describing such a state of affairs: mistakes were made. Aw, bullshit. You made mistakes. It’s okay. We all do.
Of course, spiritual revanchism is impossible, because time is irrecoverable and actions are, in fact, irrevocable. No amount of acting adolescent will make a person actually adolescent; the result is often a catastrophe for all the people who have come to lean on the person whose decisions are collapsing underneath them.
I must have first heard revanchism from Christopher Hitchens, here or there; he’s the guy I read who is most likely to use such a term, anyway. He recently died, and a friend of mine, a devout Episcopalian, said something to the effect of, “Here’s hoping he finds more peace in the next life than he did in this one.” The assumption here, of course, is that Hitchens’ notorious penchant for boozing and smoking was a symptom of something deeply broken in him. And I don’t deny that that’s possible; the other thing he had an undeniable penchant for was public, titanic curmudgeonliness, at least late in life, after he fled to the right of the political spectrum.
But honestly? There’s a part of me that thinks that Hitchens was just a guy who never had to worry about spiritual revanchism. He lived high on the hog, did good (and bad)** work, and though no doubt he died with some regrets, very few of them must have been of the sort that most of us, those of us who live the lives of quiet desperation, who get married rather than moving to Prague, who work in coffeeshops rather than applying for internships at This American Life, who stay silent rather than confessing love to a good friend, ponder every day.
**and a lot of
*
senescence — (1) the condition or process of deterioration with age. (2) loss of a cell’s power of division and growth.
So it probably won’t surprise you that I’ve recently come from my grandmother’s house. Today is her 90th birthday, and there is a sense in which she’s admirably healthy: she gets around fine, can still kind of drive, her eyesight is pretty good, and she’s not really physically incapacitated at all. She can’t reach things on high shelves and complains a lot about aches and pains, but she remains much more vigorous than a lot of people I’ve met who are ten years younger.
But I was treated to a full blast of I’m-going-to-die-soon talk today. Understandable, absolutely, but not really a pick-me-up, especially when accompanied with a lot of borderline delusional blather about my uncle’s job (into which I won’t delve). I was there with my father, who apparently hears this sort of thing all the time (and I can say that I have memories of my grandmother talking about her own death dating back to my childhood, when she was in her early 60s), but there was something about this that was heavier, closer to the bone, than it ever has been before. Maybe it was just the birthday doldrums. I’m 58 years younger than my grandmother, and I get them, too. But holy god, it really felt like she was just about ready to check out.
I can’t really remember where I first heard the word senescence, but I do remember that my first understanding of the word was, in fact, the second definition cited above — loss of a cell’s power of division and growth. Meaning, in all likelihood, that I learned it in a biology class some years ago. Anyway, this definition seems significant to me now, because my grandmother, though she is not what she was as a young and beautiful girl-about-town in WWII-era Los Angeles, hasn’t deteriorated in the same obvious ways that a lot of people her age have. But she seems to have lost her power of division and growth, as it were. Adaptation, healing, change: these things are beyond her capacity anymore. She’s not actively collapsing, but when damaged, she’s not able to do anything but lament that the damage was done.
I come from a long line of spiritual revanchists, my grandmother not least among them, and having reached her senescence, I think she does a small and passive version of it more and more. Now and again she expresses the idea that death wouldn’t be so bad, and though I’m sure that some of this is motivated by a religious belief that there’s a heaven, in which she will be comfortable and happy***, I also suspect that to some degree she’s starting to grow tired of living with her own unremitting regret: that she married two different alcoholics, that she couldn’t inculcate her sons with religion, that she didn’t go to college when she had a chance, and so on.
***It’s worth noting that she will also be without my father, myself, or any of her other descendants in this heaven, at least barring a mass conversion event that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. It can be a little insulting that someone you love expects to be happiest in a world that doesn’t contain you, but then, I expect that it’s all just a delusion anyway.
It would be hard not to be like that. I have a hard time not being like that myself, and I’m one third of her age. What is there to be done? I don’t have any answers to that question. There’s a level on which people are built how they’re built, and if you’re built to regret what you do, you’ll regret it no matter what it is. All you can do is try to manage it, I guess, and to live so that your regrets are ones you can cope with.