Leaving Kilroy

Last night I returned from Halifax (Nova Scotia (Canada (Earth—well, I guess I am still on Earth (come to think of it, why do we say we are on Earth, but in Canada; after all, my physical relationship to Canada is (or more properly, was) the same as my physical relationship to Earth)))).   I was at a conference there—mirabile dictu, a good conference. 

At the hotel bar one evening, one of the participants noted that the first incarnation of this particular conference in 2004 was the first time he had been the senior member at a conference.  I knew exactly what he meant.  Somewhere along the line, I moved from being one of the young folk to being one of the old folk at a few conferences.  (Now since I am just 45, this surely says something about the kind of conferences to which I get invited, but I am not sure what.)  I’ve noticed this at the last few conferences—while sitting around talking about the academy (an occupational hazard for professors), I’m the one giving advice to assistant professors.  I don’t know when this transition happened.

Which is exactly the theme of the second volume of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.  In volume 2, A Buyer’s Market, our narrator notes:

Certain stages of experience might be compared with the game of Russian billiards, played (as I used to play with Jean, when the time came) on those small green tables, within the secret recesses of which, at the termination of a given passage of time—a quarter of an hour, I think—the hidden gate goes down; after the descent of which, the coloured balls return no longer to the slot to be replayed; and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

This volume certainly has a different tone than the first—for one thing it is a much more compressed period than the leisurely descriptions of school in volume 1.  The Buyer’s Market in the title is, I assume, the marriage market—but this is never made really clear.  Our narrator grows up in this novel; one senses that while the first novel is the story of a kid, future novels will be about an adult.  Cleverly, the novel doesn’t really have a striking break point—it isn’t really clear when the change even happens here.  We can see it most clearly in the narrator’s relationship with women—at the beginning we still have the crushes of a kid; by the end, we have someone sliding into a meaningless tryst with a loose woman to whom he feels no genuine attachment.

So, if I think about my own life, when did I grow up?  I used to think this song was musical brilliance.  Now?  Well…it’s still not bad playing in the background, but, I suspect, only because it reminds me of my youth.  When did any of us grow up? 

(The Wee Reader may translate this thought experiment to some future time, project backwards and imagine a time when the current manifestation of the Wee Reader is now a Past and manifestly Younger version of the Aged Reader and thus the change under discussion will have Come True.  In said thought Experiment, no fair crafting a Future Defining Event to mark the Change.)