Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Have you ever read a book that perfectly captured the essence of many aspects of your life experience? Scenes and characters that are so eerily similar and perfectly rendered that you know with certainty that the author has been through the very same sort of thing you have and that this work of fiction is really, actually, an autobiography in disguise? High-fidelity is this book to me. I don’t think at any other time I would have appreciated it in quite the same way. The foolishness and confusion and self-protection involved in being a man that hasn’t quite decided to grow up. There are a lot of us out there. It is an epidemic in the sort of Fight Club, lost-male-generation, man-child way. A lot of men I know are really clueless. I see the same sort of mistakes over and over. If you want to know what I’m talking about you just should read the book because it really is just about this ugly fact…repeated over and over. Thankfully, it has a happy, sloppily realistic ending. Here’s a selection I really enjoyed:

What happened to me during the funeral was something
like this: I saw, for the first time, how scared I am of dying,
and of other people dying, and how this fear has prevented
me from doing all sorts of things, like giving up smoking
(because if you take death too seriously or not seriously
enough, as I have been doing up till now, then what’s the
point?), and thinking about my life, especially my job, in a
way that contains a concept of the future (too scary, because
the future ends in death). But most of all it has prevented
me from sticking with a relationship, because if you stick
with a relationship, and your life becomes dependent on that
person’s life, and then they die, as they are bound to do,
unless there are exceptional circumstances, e.g., they are a
character from a science-fiction novel . . . well, you’re up the
creek without a paddle, aren’t you? It’s OK if I die first, I
guess, but having to die before someone else dies isn’t a
necessity that cheers me up much: how do I know when she’s
going to die? Could be run over by a bus tomorrow, as the
saying goes, which means I have to throw myself under a bus
today. When I saw Janet Lydon’s face at the crematorium
… how can you be that brave? Now what does she do? To
me, it makes more sense to hop from woman to woman until
you’re too old to do it anymore, and then you live alone and
die alone and what’s so terrible about that, when you look at
the alternatives? There were some nights with Laura when I’d kind
of nestle into her back in bed when she was asleep,
and I’d be filled with this enormous, nameless terror, except
now I have a name for it: Brian. Ha, ha. OK, not really a
name, but I could see where it came from, and why I wanted
to sleep with Rosie the pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm
woman, and if that sounds feeble and self-serving at the same
time—oh, right! He sleeps with other women because he has
a fear of death!—well, I’m sorry, but that’s the way things
are.

When I nestled into Laura’s back in the night, I was
afraid because I didn’t want to lose her, and we always lose
someone, or they lose us, in the end. I’d rather not take the
risk. I’d rather not come home from work one day in ten or
twenty years’ time to be faced with a pale, frightened woman
saying that she’d been shitting blood— I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
but this is what happens to people—-and then we go to the doctor
and then the doctor says it’s inoperable and then … I
wouldn’t have the guts, you know? I’d probably just take off,
live in a different city under an assumed name, and Laura
would check in to the hospital to die and they’d say, “Isn’t
your partner coming to visit?” and she’d say, “No, when he
found out about the cancer he left me.” Great guy! “Cancer?
Sorry, that’s not for me! I don’t like it!” Best not put yourself
in that position. Best leave it all alone.

So where does this get me? The logic of it all is that I
play a percentage game. I’m thirty-six now, right? And let’s
say that most fatal diseases—cancer, heart disease, what-
ever—hit you after the age of fifty. You might be unlucky,
and snuff it early, but the fifty-plus age group get more than
their fair share of bad stuff happening to them. So to play
safe, you stop then: a relationship every couple of years for
the next fourteen years, and then get out, stop dead, give it
up. It makes sense. Will I explain this to whomever I’m see-
ing? Maybe. It’s fairer, probably. And less emotional, some-
how, than the usual mess that ends relationships. “You’re
going to die, so there’s not much point in us carrying on, is
there?” It’s perfectly acceptable if someone’s emigrating, or
returning to their own country, to stop a relationship on the
grounds that any further involvement would be too painful,
so why not death? The separation that death entails has got
to be more painful than the separation of emigration, surely?
I mean, with emigration, you can always go with her. You
can always say to yourself, “Oh, fuck it, I’ll pack it all in and
go and be a cowboy in Texas/tea-picker in India,” etc. You
can’t do that with the big D, though, can you? Unless you
take the Romeo route, and if you think about it …

Anyway, if you’re a man…at least this annoying, immature, exasperating type of man or you have to deal with one, you should read this book. It may even be helpful.

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