By Stout Cortez
Disclaimer: This essay contains Wes Anderson spoilers, I guess, and math references, which maybe is triggering (pun intended). It is not intended for audiences who do not appreciate Bruce Springsteen.
I’ve been young my entire life.
The most pointless sentence you’ve ever read, perhaps. We’ve all been young our whole lives, up until a particular point, should we be fortunate enough to reach it — that’s what “being young” means.
But listen, there’s more to it than that. I was born right before the birth cutoff for my grade and thus the youngest kid in my class. I grew up with a sister two years older, making me the little brother. Throughout my early adulthood, being young was kind of an important part of my whole appeal; it’s been part of my identity, like “being smart” or “being athletic,” and I fear that without it “being snarky” would have been substituted in its place.
Slowly, all those parts of my identity have been degraded. I’ve found over time that “being smart” just meant good at tests and knowing a few synonyms and African capitals. As the old saying goes, If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room. I find myself in a lot of the “right rooms” these days. I’m also physically slower than I once was, and not quite as strong or durable. And here’s the worst part: As I sit here today, I’m the oldest I’ve ever been in my entire life. Perhaps, even, a little bit “not young” anymore.
If I’m honest, things started changing for me at the world-weary age of six, when my little brother was born. That made me a little brother and an older brother. It was the first inflection point I can remember in my life. But now that the answer to the question “am I still young” is a resounding “I dunno, maybe not,” I find myself on the precipice of The Big Inflection Point, wielding all the acquired wisdom, old sayings, and eclectic riddles my dad told me to help me deal with the challenge. Here’s one of those riddles: How long can you walk into a forest? Answer: Halfway, because at that point you are walking out. There comes an inflection point where things change, when you are no longer young, when you are no longer walking into the forest.
The most blatant and unimaginative thesis statement you’ve ever read, perhaps.
But listen, there’s more to it than that.
Part One: y = –x^2
Liking Wes Anderson.
This is the sort of thing you do when you’re “wise beyond your years,” like listening to Zooey Deschanel’s music or having a night in with a puzzle and a cat. But is it an age-appropriate, unironic thing you can do into your late 30s before starting to feel a certain way about it?
I’m loyal, so I think yes, it is. Wes Anderson’s great, his films are moving, and taking in art that moves you is sort of the entire point of taking in art.
My favorite film of his is The Grand Budapest Hotel, a story about a young lobby boy’s mentorship from an older concierge who manages a palatial destination for the continental elite in southern Germany. The film has the refined air that you’d find in any Wes Anderson movie — muted pastels, ornate sets, impossible symmetrical compositions, ridiculous animated breaks, brooding characters who are physically incapable of stuttering. Something that makes Wes Anderson’s films seem like precious antiques amid the flea market of late-stage Hollywood rot is how anti-cinematic they often are — too contrived to worry about seeming uncontrived, too rich in artifice to worry about being artificial.
The Grand Budapest Hotel not only tells us a story, but invites us to consider ourselves as a character within the story, one whose job it is to appreciate it. The main plot is told in a conversation in the empty and aging interior of the once grand hotel — between the lobby boy, now an old man, and a writer, rapt by genuine curiosity about the man’s story. It invites us to see Anderson himself as the man lovingly telling a story of a misplaced era, and ourselves as the appreciators of a nostalgic epic partially exhumed from the sands of time.
One of the things I most appreciate about Wes Anderson’s films is they’re devoid of business — not in the anti-commercial non-capitalist sense, but in the theatrical sense. The characters are never given something to do while they’re performing their intended action; they just perform the action, with all of their focus, quietly demanding you return the same.
I admit to being seduced by the older ways of doing things — overwhelmed and bored by a too manual task, free of the burdens of modern distractions and the tyranny of limitless choice. Getting older doesn’t scare me, embracing these things seems congruent with older-ness, but as I struggle with the idea of not being young, I’m considering how the concept of “focus” can provide a unifying force, not unlike how a parabola orients itself around a single point.
As the crest of my life’s inverted parabola insinuates itself into view, and I get as close to my great arc’s focus as I mathematically can, I’m considering whether I can replace the box set of “young” traits from the library of my identity with a new one: Focus. Simplification. Knowledge of many things, perhaps an expertise in some.
A white-knuckle grip on life. A glance averted from the inevitable grave. An appreciation of the past generation’s treasures: a Wes Anderson plot, a Bruce Springsteen song.
Listening to Bruce Springsteen
A few years ago I got a record player. My record collection is small, but I’m tending it. I have some compilation albums from the fifties and sixties that my dad gave me. Among others, I’ve got Rumours by Fleetwood Mac and Sam’s Town by The Killers; Sly and the Family Stone and Kanye West; two Vampire Weekend albums, two Phoebe Bridgers albums, and three by Bruce Springsteen — so far.
You can’t hear it, but I’m putting on Bruce’s first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Can you believe he wrote these songs when he was a teenager? Just listen to the first verse and chorus of the second track, “Growin’ Up:”
Well I stood stone-like at midnight
Suspended in my masquerade
And I combed my hair 'til it was just right
And commanded the night brigade
I was open to pain
And crossed by the rain
And I walked on a crooked crutch
I strolled all alone
Through a fallout zone
Came out with my soul untouched
I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd
When they said, "Sit down, " I stood up
Ooh-ooh, growin' up
It’s hard to say exactly how he does it, but Bruce gets the feeling of growing up just right: going out at night, strolling through a combat zone, getting bombarded by life’s pains, and coming through it all ok — strong, immortal. Melancholy. How did he get it right while he was in it?
Perhaps I doth insist too much, but getting older doesn’t scare me; though I admit it is sad to think, as the initial ballistic energy that set me on my trajectory wanes, that I’m nearing my apex and it’s all downhill from here. I’ve lived parts of my life like a Bruce Springsteen song, tear-assing down the New Jersey turnpike — or clasping a girl’s hand and asking her to move across the country with me in pursuit of a better life, with nothing to offer her but my spirit and what we could fit in the back of a Subaru. Now that I’m driving more sensibly and that girl is now my wife, I’m trying not to become a character out of another Bruce song, looking back spitefully at my faded Glory Days.
Part II: y=x^3
Perspective shift and the heft of inheritance
A couple of years ago, when the boss was a still youthful 72, my wife and I went to see him perform live on Broadway. He was brilliant, every bit the blue-collar hero of rock and roll his legend says he is. With his proud, workmanlike showman’s energy, he weaved his songs into a narrative of his life. He told us about playing at the Stone Pony, about the E-Street band, about the day he reached an inflection point in his own life: when he met his soulmate, the big man — the sax man — Clarence Clemons.
However, the person who seemed to have the largest impact in Bruce’s life was his father. “I made these songs about you, dad,” Bruce said. The man in On Fire who rolls out from under the car he’s working on, the man in Thunder Road who aches for a better life but labors to honor the one he has — this man was never Bruce Springsteen. Bruce is an artist, not a mechanic. He brought a workmanlike attitude to his craft, sure, but the people we’re hearing about in Bruce’s songs aren’t really Bruce; they’re the people he looked up to when he was young.
And then it hit me: I see Bruce the way Bruce sees his father. “Growing up” isn’t actually becoming like our parents, it’s realizing that our parents were themselves just trying to live up to an expectation of adulthood they saw in their parents. Just as (you have to imagine) their parents did. Adulthood is a never-ending string of performances from scared kids who ache for the better lives they could have had but labor to bring honor to the ones they do have.
That’s what Bruce was telling us. It’s also what Wes Anderson was telling us in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Even though it’s my favorite film of his, I recently realized that I’d really only gotten half the point. The story isn’t about a concierge keeping up a grand hotel in its heyday — it’s about a man who is trying to hold his vocation up to an ideal that’s already passed. “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it,” the adult lobby boy says of his mentor to the writer who is transcribing his story.
The audience, by the way, is not the writer at all. Wes Anderson himself is the writer, and we are the little girl in the oft forgotten opening and closing scenes of the movie, laying flowers at the statue of “the great writer” who has transcribed this story. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson actually hands us the key to appreciating all his movies. These are stories long past, he tells us, of people living to ideals that never were, told to people who want to embody a romance that’s unattainable.
As some saying goes, probably, the first step of maturity is realizing that your parents are people. There is no heavier realization than the one that sneaks up on you, wheezing and glow-eyed in the dead of night, to whisper “you are as old now as your father was in your first memory of him,” before leaving a lifetime of implications for you to unpack. It’s heavy, this bag of implications. My friend Jim wrote a one-shot film about it, which won best short at Sundance in 2017. No, seriously. It’s called Thunder Road (no, seriously), it takes 12 minutes to watch, and if you have a mom it will make you cry. Watch it.
There’s something hopelessly meta about all this — about The Grand Budapest Hotel, about integrating the curve our lives are on, about cruising into sight of this inflection point and seeing the unbroken string of performances that we’re inheriting with our lives. But whatever it is, no longer being young is not the beginning of a downward inflection at all; it’s something else entirely.
The middle third
Listen, I’ll surface my subtext here. There’s a reason why I’m talking so much about music and movies in this meditation on losing my youthfulness. I might no longer be able to say that I’ve been young for my whole life, but I can say that the American popular culture that’s dyed my psyche in its saturated shades has extolled the ideals of youth for my entire life. Every movie star I grew up watching is still clinging to the limelight with graceless desperation, filling their faces with “the right amount” of botox and trying to be the same Brad Pitt (or whoever) he’s always been.
Where are the Joan Didions of yesteryear? Who is there to show us how to age with grace? Because it can be done — in fact, it’s easy to see how once you see it: The end of youth is not the same as the beginning of the end of life.
But maybe that’s just it. You can be shown the way to growing up but no farther; once you’ve done that part, figuring out what to do with your adult brain and body and earthbound soul is entirely up to you. This phase of life could well be a decaying slope — it could be anything at all. It is everything life can be.
It’s entering a golden period where you have both wisdom and the vitality to use it. It’s being able to relate to the young adults in your life, sharing in their misadventure while also guiding them from catastrophe. It’s tending a garden, it’s forgetting a skill, it’s confidently entering a new room, it’s losing touch with your best friends, it’s remembering the strength in solitude. It’s outsmarting a lesser rival, it’s having a conversation with your wife in total silence, it’s looking out the window of the home you worked to afford, it’s burying the first pet you bought yourself, it’s buying your child her first toy. It’s five fingers grasping the tip of your pinky. It’s signing on the dotted line when the lawyer presents you with the papers — the mortgage disclosure, the job offer, the death certificate.
It’s all the chaotic paths we don’t have names for. It’s a flattening of one curve, but the very beginning of some new, stranger one into an unknown dimension that nobody else can chart for us.
Here’s one last story.
Two of our friends (and their two-year-old daughter) came to visit us last week — very close friends. She was the officiant at our wedding, and I was the officiant in theirs. We see them three times or so a year, now. She told us how she’s feeling now that she’s gotten her first negative tox screen since her breast cancer diagnosis 18 months ago. I’ll paraphrase:
Coming out of being postpartum and getting the breast cancer diagnosis was hard — it was really hard. But you know what, I just decided that I’m going to live a long life, and I’m going to make decisions that allow me to make that reality as likely as possible. It’s sometimes hard to see myself naked in the mirror, and look at my new body. I’ll never be the same person that I was before being pregnant, or before getting cancer, but I see this as the beginning of the middle third of my life. And I’m going to appreciate it.
Amen.
Why look backward — youth is what you call the thing you don’t understand. Life is the only thing we’ve got.
Stout Cortez is a 37-year-old American man that Tangle has decided they want to let write an essay four times a year. He stares at streams and thinks about space.
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