Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual LET OLD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT I recently received an invitation to my fiftieth-year high school reunion, and am impressed with how little interested I am in attending it. For many people,...
...957-1157, passim...
...If the announcement of the reunion had asked for a reason for not attending, I would have replied: "See Proust, Time Regained, pp...
...Yet I have decided to take a pass on this, my fiftieth reunion...
...My God," I thought, "who put the white hair and white mustache on Dick Karlov...
...My reigning memory is of a very noisy band that seemed, for much of the evening, to be playing a hideous rendition of "New York, New York"—and this in Chicago—with the bandleader singing the words at a decibel level slightly above that of the response of a man who has just been pushed off a cliff...
...I recall regretting that I hadn't been financially more successful than I was, so that I might give the band a couple of grand to pack up its instruments and depart the hall instanter...
...The vain were vainer...
...A number of people seemed to have widened considerably, as if someone had fooled with their horizontal button...
...Marcel goes on to remark that, in his mind, the men at this party were not old men, but were "young men in an advanced state of withering...
...For many people, their adolescence was an awkward, painful, really hellacious time...
...Too true...
...Random House...
...Two class clowns, apparently having gotten serious, turned out to be physicians...
...At these earlier reunions, all the cards have not yet been dealt...
...Mine, on the contrary, was so pleasing that I sometimes think that I peaked in my seventeenth year...
...Outcroppings of gray and even some white hair were showing forth...
...and a few people had had bouts with cancer to report...
...Take my reaction and multiply it by a few hundred: That's what it would be like to attend my reunion...
...I can face the fact that we all grow older, but I prefer to face it only one or two persons at a time...
...I have, I think, an inkling of what it would be like to see them all assembled in their aged state...
...Several weeks ago, while giving a talk in Chicago, I noticed a face in the audience from high school days...
...Twenty more years have now surreptitiously slipped by...
...What I noticed more than anything was that most people were not much different than they had been at eighteen—they were their old selves, only, somehow, more so...
...Things cannot have gotten better for most of my classmates...
...We were, as a class, not 50 years old, so there were not then a great many people taken out of the game by death...
...One can appear still to have a good shot at mastering life...
...A large room filled with people in this condition is more than I can handle...
...Nearly every day I went to high school the way aging brides go to their weddings: filled with feelings of contentment, success, and anticipation...
...For a few seconds I did not understand why it was that I had difficulty in recognizing the master of the house and the guests and why everyone in the room appeared to have put on a disguise—in most cases a powdered wig—which changed him completely," Proust, in his great novel, has his agent Marcel observe...
...That is why I shan't be attending my fiftieth-year class reunion...
...Best wishes, J.E...
...the funny, funnier, the dopey, dopier...
...one can brag a bit about one's children's extraordinary accomplishments, one's own bright future...
...Thirty years out, too, I could see the ravages that time had begun to make on my old classmates...
...In some ways, a fiftieth class reunion ought to be easier than a tenth or a twenty-fifth...
...I attended a thirtieth-year class reunion, to which I had looked forward...
...I feel, somehow, that it is best I not return, as the announcer for the Lone Ranger radio show had it, "to those thrilling days of yesteryear...
...You can try to make the case that you have become a much deeper person than the rather shallow character everyone remembers roaming the halls of high school...
...More than a few heartbreaking toupees were on display...
...Some, prominent when kids, didn't show up at all, leaving one to wonder if the defeats dealt them by life were too obvious to be displayed at a reunion...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...The most impressive success in the room was a man, a peripheral figure when in high school, who owned a national chain of sporting-goods stores...
...Lots of divorces, though...
...the slightly crazed now well along to madness...
...Indeed nothing is more painful than the contrast between the mutability of people and the fixity of memory, when it is borne in upon us that what has been preserved with so much freshness in our memory can no longer possess any trace of that quality in life...
...Time," Marcel remarks, "which changes human beings does not alter the image we have of them...
...C. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor translation...
Vol. 9 • April 2004 • No. 29
