On the first chill, semi-wintery day in late November, I hobbled with a friend to my local café for a latte and a muffin. My thoughts move towards how many years or—more direly—months are left for me to still be able to make this walk. I know I should just take the walk without reflecting about how much time I have left. I ought to try to live with the pleasure and pain of the moment and forget about reflecting on mortality and the future. However, for me it is very difficult to do—my mind won’t allow for it. Those thoughts rarely leave me at this point in my life.
I also find myself flooded with all sorts of images and thoughts beyond my harping on how ephemeral life is. Past experiences keep on reappearing; images from my Bronx boyhood—far from an idyll with too many uneasy moments but nothing resembling a nightmare—sometimes emerge. I remember playing punchball in the mostly concrete backyard of my apartment house and stickball and football in the local park and later, awkwardly and with little pleasure, sitting at night on benches and cars and flirting with teenage girls from the neighborhood. Nothing dramatic occurred—just quotidian activities that I then gave little thought to. But these images from the past have resurfaced, including every face and name that spent two years attending the same classes in junior high with me. I knew few intimate details about most of my classmates, and I haven’t seen them for years, but they oddly and vividly turn up in my memories at this late date. I have a hard time figuring out why I recall those times with such exactitude. Possibly, I am trying to stop time and return to the past—a less complex, more innocent era, especially from this vantage point. Or in some unconscious manner, do I see the resurrection of these memories as providing some revelation about those adolescent years that has eluded me?
On the next day, I go for breakfast with another friend, we talk about how dark the Trumpian political future looks (one of the few hopes I have is that he will make a mess of the economy and alienate his constituency), and then we shift abruptly into chatter about professional basketball and the fate of the Knicks. The latter is a subject that doesn’t weigh us down in any way, for it is pure escape with almost no effect on our lives. But thinking about and losing oneself in sports and films—though the latter is a passion that often demands a more subtle response than merely rooting for the Knicks—offers relief from my normal dark thoughts about the self and the world.
Sitting in this café, I notice that most of the other customers are in their 20s and 30s—NYU students, people who do tech work or have Wall Street jobs—and I both envy and feel some despair about the years that they have ahead of them. The future seems bound by environmental disasters and a rise of right-wing populism that will endanger democracy and constrict culture (e.g., banning books, restricting abortion). Of course, history turns in unpredictable ways, and an age of social democracy may arrive where modest reforms may allow us to live in more equitable and just times. But, at the moment, everything looks bleak.
