Salinger for Millennials or Y-Generation Classics
Congratulations, you’ve passed the test. You are a normal person.
There is this plot where the main character, whose heart is left in a thousand pieces, suddenly realises that it’s time to go on; he gazes at his blinking laptop screen with a wise air, listening to a wistful wailing of some country singer before adding his masterpiece about the advantage of painful break-ups to the world literature. The world is writhing in agony but proud Peter doesn’t give up, forgets Wendy, and beats the devil himself. It’s just Wendy! Just a worthless girl. The fool goes on living her mediocre life, working as a waitress, for example, and raising her ordinary children. She’s happy, but now Peter is Pulitzer’s prize owner for the best fiction. Now Peter is more than happy, he’s just a lucky thing.
Filthy lie, isn’t it? How many times in recent, let’s say, 5 years your heart was left in pieces? How many world literature masterpieces you have written in this period? No, long massages, feverishly written to the object of love have nothing to do with a literary legacy. You complain to your friends, make a long and hard way to get someone’s attention, present yourself as a wreck in the eyes of others just to get a little bit of love. You enjoy how pathetic you’ve become. You can’t forgive yourself your folded arms while someone is there, on another side of life, working as a waiter, raising two ruddy peanuts, and is happy as he is. And you have nothing but to chew your lip in envy and wait for the Man Booker Prize to fall down on you. Or maybe to visit a psychotherapist, and to forget, forget, forget…
Can you remember the name of a loser mentioned above?
Congratulations, you’ve passed the test. You are a normal person.
When Irish writer Sally Rooney was 28 years old, her second novel “Normal People” was published, it immediately became a best-seller, and even was adapted for the screen two years later. “Salinger for Millennials”, said media about the book. Salinger. For millennials. Only think about it! It’s embarrassing even to be ironic.
Classmates Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are the main characters. He is a school football team star, life and soul of the party. She is a withdrawn lonely black sheep, a strange girl from a rich family. His mother works as a housemaid in the Sheridan’s’ manor. They feel the tug of each other, and they even start a weird relationship during their final class, which continued at Dublin University. Both entered the university but he did because of Marianne’s support and insistence.
She grew up in a toxic family where she’s been beaten and humiliated since childhood, but Marianne is independent of other people’s opinions and knows the value of her intellect. He was raised by a loving mother, but Connell is a sensitive neurotic, too shy even in his dreams.
Sally Rooney starts “Normal People” with an epigraph quoting George Eliot’s’ “Daniel Deronda”: “It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.” Of course, it is possible to write thousands of words about the infantilism of the Y-generation, their precarity, fear to live, but the truth, after all, is that once in your youth you meet someone who you can trust, and lose your loneliness forever, because no matter where you are, where you go, your dialogue won’t be cut off in the middle of a sentence. This is the only way you get to know this world.
And of course, no love in the world can be happy (yes, you may consider this radicalism a generational problem), because love is finite; because you always have to let someone go, to open your sweating hand and realise that people don’t belong to each other. You grow up because you become able to be free of the Other’s look, aimed inside you, this insightful, no, intense look. You become free from yourself.
And yes, no doubt that love, which knows no age, is a youth’s prerogative because this is the time when you can learn how to love and forget how to be afraid of yourself. To see your reflection in the pupils of the Other. To accept your reflection in the pupils of the Other. Get used to the thought that your life could be completely different if you’d meet someone else on that sunny day. Get used to the thought that there’s no and will never be anyone more valuable than this certain person (“It’s different”, say characters to each other about their relations; it is also a cliché, but who of us this lucky thing who won the opportunity to live not like the others in a lottery?) Accept the fact that you won’t get a Noble Prize in Literature but you will surely have your heart broken in pieces by someone. This is a wheel of life: the one who never felt it is going to be a stone in the next life.
Marianne and Connell hurt and heal each other: he teaches her how to trust, and she teaches him to be brave. Sally Rooney teaches her readers things which they must be aware of: the Other will always be a mystery. Thoughts and feelings of a person in front of you are inscrutable and inaccessible. Doubts are harmful. Life is deep and boundless, you can’t hide from it.
My course mate told me one day in an encyclopedic tone: “People under 13 years look up to their parents, then up to 21 years they take an example from their friends, and after that, they are free to build their own relationship models.” I was always envious of those hypothetic people, possibly originated from the movies and books, where traumatic break-up with a crush becomes a career growth impulse. Of people who probably can love but have never (nevernevernevernever) lived in a world where nothing exists but love; a world with no rules and no correct or false answers. Those dratted people have never followed their lovers to hell. Those dratted people have never experienced neurotic disturbances; they weren’t afraid of making everyone around them into enemies, blaming themselves for the slightest delinquency. They can build role models by themselves when the time comes. Their best friends are actually the best. In everything. Always.
However, life is not the thing we were taught by our parents. Life isn’t a thing you can learn. Life is just a thing that only can be lived. Day after day. Without breaks. Without day-offs.
Life is chaotic, and the thought of this scares me to death. The world is unstable and is subject to someone’s control (if God exists then he hasn’t the purpose to punish that guy with an anxiety attack). People can’t be the way we imagined them to be; their feelings and thoughts remain no, not even a secret or a mystery, but something that can not belong to us. The order is unreachable: the only thing that we can do for ourselves is to act and to feel following our wish, without wanting to place everything in order because nothing has its own place. You all who read this article also don’t have a place of your own.
It always annoyed me when I was asked: “What is the purpose of your life?” I want to get to a mountain to watch the sunrise. To drink a glass of champagne in the moment of utter joy. To burst into tears on a friend’s shoulder. I want to be heard. To be read. It seemed to me that if I watch, for instance, 1,000 movies in a row every wish of mine will come true. Now, every morning I frightenedly fix my eyes on the orderly rows of the books I bought but still haven’t read. I go through the book spines with my fingers and tremble in fear thinking that I’ll never be able to read any of them. I will be preparing for a real life with such zeal that I will never start living.
I don’t know how to live, just like Marianne Sheridan or Connell Waldron do, like Holden Caulfield or probably Francis Scott Fitzgerald did, like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, or for example Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire did not know. People have been facing the same problems for generations, trying to solve them another way. Nothing happens. We grow up. That’s it.
We grow out. Of those cute blondies. Of a favourite dress. Of each other. We have to be ready to say farewell one day to everything that was a part of us. We have to be ready to come back as another person from a long journey. We mustn’t promise anything when we leave. To anyone. Never.
My friend called me a cynic when I tried to explain to her that I was ready to bid her farewell at any minute of my life. I never could explain it to her: this readiness is the only thing that protects me from the injustice of this world. If you don’t want to wear an armour you have to be ready for deadly wounds. It is this readiness (to grow, to love, to grow out, to be deadly wounded but still alive) which “Normal People” novel is all about.
I suppose literature and cinema are equal in their power of love. People who read nothing and who watch no movies have always aroused mistrust in me since they probably are unable to love (as it seemed to me). Only a person who once fell in love (and I’m sure that you can only fall in love once and for all) becomes able to empathise. And only words filled with love can compose a novel, which has all chances to make up for the world literature; and only a plot, constructed following the laws of love becomes a life because love is life, and love is irresistible because one day it will shatter you to pieces and it will be impossible to put yourself back together. At least that’s what was bequeathed to us by the musician Ian Curtis who didn’t know how to live.
In my youth, I thought: Pain is inevitable. The world hurts. Metamorphoses disable. To feel means to rub salt in a fresh wound. Now I think: Any feeling is composed of the readiness to survive this feeling in the first place. The readiness to be hurt, to lie helpless on the floor, to bleed, to cry is going to heal you forever from the fear of being hurt, lying helpless on the floor, bleeding, crying. No, you shouldn’t see every stranger as a traitor or a liar, or wait for a friend to stab your back as a blessing of God. Although it may be useful to stop making lists of those who died in a battle, cherishing your heartache, growing your sorrow, fertilising your grief but to take a good look, maybe for the first time in your life, at the flaming sunset horizon, the face of the one who stands beside. Neither dead nor alive gods don’t want to destroy you. They never did.
Be brave, courageous, and proud, fight the beasts, win the monsters from under your bed but keep in mind that you may be defeated one day.
Never ask for anything, especially if you know that you will not be able to handle this gift.
Life is chaotic but expectable. Terrible contradiction. We can control our thoughts and feelings as long as we want but we can never control the raging water flow around us. We are in the middle of an immense wavy ocean. So close your eyes, relax every muscle of your poor body, and let the waves close over you.
Omnifinery — Feel Comfort in Your Individuality
Text: Editorial Staff
Join our Omni Culture Club (OCC) for more beautiful thoughts and artistic revelations
Find Omni on Instagram,on Twitter and on Reddit
Evgeny is an art director and a global citizen based in Hong Kong and working between Asia and Europe.
Find Evgeny on Instagram and his rants on Twitter
