Exactly a year ago, I was traveling in China with my family, visiting extended family. I had wanted to read Richard Yates’ “Revolutionary Road,” but didn’t have the chance. I found out just how tiring it can be to visit so many family members and in the dead heat of summer. I was drained of energy, every day, for a few weeks. Before the trip, it didn’t help that work wasn’t letting me sleep either.
I finally got to the book this past January. It was such great writing, but so very sad. And it has been on my mind often. Scenes from it would randomly pop up in my head, especially lately. Perhaps it is because I happen to be in my mid-20’s with a life of the “in-between” – New York City and Greenwich, CT. Perhaps it is because so much has happened this past year.
The book hit a chord with me on multiple levels. Perhaps it is because I recognize myself in the book. I see the ugly and weak sides of myself and am afraid to look deeper, afraid I will end up doomed like these book characters. And I realized – no “perhaps.” Yes, I have many faults. Faults I have indeed, but I do not have a pessimistic world view. We all enter relationships with historical ghosts and immature, imperfect tendencies. What is more important is that I want to progress, grow, and I want someone, in addition to myself, who can tell me when I’m right, wrong, and crazy.
It is important to keep in mind, though, that while growth is best done in relationships, it is also hardest in relationships. In the process, we may end up losing the person for whom we fell. I guess that is part of being vulnerable, that love is like the leap of faith scene in Indiana Jones’ “The Last Crusade.” This last year, I learned so much about myself through others. I find it all very rewarding. Despite the tears, angst, and pain, I am happy to find out that I still see so much happiness and hope in the world, all around me. I don’t think I know how to be pessimistic about situations. As a close friend of mine reminded me, “You are the only one I know who can use the words ‘incandescently happy’, and you are the only one I know who is so happy at the sight of peonies, the little things in life.” And I am happiest when I’m sitting under a tree with a book and snacks for company, running in the woods, cat-sitting, at the beach with friends, dancing like no one is watching at a New York club…or on an empty elevator at work, reading xkcd, etc.
Big sigh. I have hope and faith…but there are moments during the week when I feel lost. His ‘Revolutionary Road’ contains some of the most masterful writing I’ve ever read, capturing the minutest details of life’s greatest existential problems — the connections we create and lose, the grand ambitions we cultivate, and the mediocrity so many of us ultimately face.
Yates’ daughter gets at the details:
“You can see yourself in the characters without taking on the pessimistic world view. In fact, the precision of the details gives the right reader a kind of joy: the shared experience of subtle perception. The outcome is nearly irrelevant, except as it gives the story weight and forward momentum. Yes, Dad doomed his people, but we recognize the details along the way—the husband saying exactly the wrong thing and the wife bitterly calling him on it; the moments with our friends when we catch ourselves posing; the times within the warmest family tableau where we feel alone and different; the low things we say when we argue, the weakness that might make confessing an infidelity seem like a good move, the feeling that life is a small thing and ought to be more. Perhaps these human frailties are more fleeting and not the total picture Dad makes them out to be for his characters. Nevertheless, we recognize them, and cringe over them, because he’s put it so exactly. That is what people are experiencing when they say they don’t like these characters. They are people who prefer not to examine the weaker sides of themselves or their friends; they just don’t see it, or think it’s worth seeing…
…How beautiful these suffering, misguided, deluded humans of 1955 really are. And as they would be today, or in 1855, or in London or Paris or Delhi.“
