Overdoing Another Book

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, by Peter Cameron

My first impression of James was that he is from an over-privileged, over-cultured Manhattan background and that, even though he is highly critical of his family’s superficiality, he has not escaped being shaped and influenced by it. I disliked him enough that I might have considered not continuing with his story if I hadn't been so intrigued by the quotes that open the book.* My patience was rewarded, because his roundabout narrative slowly reveals hints of his true inner life and painful experiences and that his "nastily superior" attitude toward people is primarily a defense mechanism--misanthrope resulting from alienation.

James is constantly concerned with using language as precisely and correctly as possible. He is precocious and over-knowledgeable about everything except his feelings and how to relate to others. He's smart and witty and insightful in his cutting observations about life, but can't find a way to connect with anyone or anything in a meaningful way. Sometimes I get in these moods where everything I see or think about depresses me. Everything seems like evidence that the world is a shitty place and getting worse. I'm not sure I ever ended up liking James or even fully empathizing, but much of what he said resonated deeply and he had me constantly chuckling wryly

James' fear of being vulnerable extends to even his readers, and if he's not quite an unreliable narrator he's certainly a reluctant one. His story includes some self-discovery, but it's subtle and gradually divulged in unarticulated ways (I often feel like I want to think something but I can’t find the language that coincides with the thought, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I’m thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.). I found this to be a quite well-written book and I had to check other reviews to make sure I wasn't the only one reminded of Catcher in the Rye as I read it. Recommended.

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*Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.
--Ovid

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.
--Denton Welch, Journal, 8 May 1944, 11.15 p.m.

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Other Quotes:

I’m not a sociopath or a freak (although I don’t suppose people who are sociopaths or freaks self-identify as such); I just don’t enjoy being with people. People, at least in my experience, rarely say anything interesting to each other. They always talk about their lives and they don’t have very interesting lives. So I get impatient. For some reason I think you should only say something if it’s interesting or absolutely has to be said.

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I knew my mother was right, but that didn’t change the way I felt about things. People always think that if they can prove they’re right, you’ll change your mind.

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Translations are merely subjective approximations and that is how I feel about everything I say: it is not what I am thinking but merely the closest I can get to it using the faulty reductive constraints of language. And so I often think it is better to say nothing than to express myself inexactly.

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I wish the whole day were like breakfast, when people are still connected to their dreams, focused inward, and not yet ready to engage with the world around them. I realized this is how I am all day; for me, unlike other people, there doesn’t come a moment after a cup of coffee or a shower or whatever when I suddenly feel alive and awake and connected to the world. If it were always breakfast, I would be fine.

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Just ignore him and he’ll go away, my mother used to say to Gillian when we were young and I bugged her. Just ignore him. All he wants is attention. In retrospect there seems to be something almost cruel about that—to simultaneously acknowledge and refuse someone’s desire for attention—especially a child’s. All he wants is attention, as if it’s bad to want attention, like wanting money or power or fame.

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She had all the best things wrong with her—incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She’s so lucky.

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I knew she thought it was probably good for me, a so-called learning experience. The problem is I don’t ever learn anything from learning experiences. In fact, I make a special effort not to learn whatever it is the learning experience is supposed to teach me, because I can’t think of anything drearier than being somebody whose character is formed by learning experiences.

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I had always thought, or hoped, that adults weren’t necessarily as hobbled by mindless conformity as so many of my peers seemed to be. I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren’t cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would cease to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.