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СпутникиРНSpaceXРоскосмосNASAOf course it’s not all bad: these days of apparent celebration can teach us a lot about ourselves
I’m writing this amid birthday party planning. I usually don’t celebrate my birthday, being one of those people who finds the passage of the years generally depressing. I don’t want time to be a fast-moving stream! I don’t want to hurtle inexorably towards death! I would prefer it if everything could slow down, or maybe stop for a little while, just until I can get my bearings. Sadly, this is not allowed.
My approach to birthdays so far has been to hide, to lie very still, as if by making no plans and refusing to acknowledge the day I might throw the hound of time off the scent and it would pass me by. This approach obviously hasn’t worked. Sooner or later you have to face up to the fact that there really is nothing you can do about it. At your back, you always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, etc etc.
Given that it’s hopeless, a party seems like a good idea. Whoever is around can put on a nice outfit and get together and eat good food and drink and maybe dance. These are the things that distract you from existential thoughts and prevent dread from taking root.
This morning I came up with what I think is quite a good, and possibly even lucrative, idea. But having no business acumen and no idea how to monetise these things, I’ll give it to you, dear reader, and maybe you can profit from it.
The idea is a kind of template for a biography. It would be structured like an anthology, with each short chapter devoted to a single birthday, beginning with your first and continuing up to whatever age you happen to be now.
Each birthday would be written by someone who was there. For your first birthday, it might be your mother. Your 12th birthday could be reconstructed by some friend from school, if you could find anyone who remembered it. Your 16th would be written by whatever random boyfriend you had at the time, your 21st by a university friend, and so on. If you spent the day alone, you’d step in to write it yourself.
The instruction would be to write down, in as few sentences as possible, the details that you remember most vividly. Was there a party? Who was there? What was the atmosphere? Was there a cake? If so, what kind? What were you wearing? Did you get drunk? Did you seem to be having fun? Did you cry? Did you throw up? Did you disappear halfway through your own party?
The entries could vary in length from a sentence to a few paragraphs. There would inevitably be gaps; they would be part of it too. Taken together, they would have a kind of pointillist effect: each birthday a small, discrete impression which, viewed from a distance, resolves into the portrait of a life.
And because the entries would be written by different people, the portrait would keep changing according to who was looking. I imagine it like one of those Arabic lanterns made from many facets of coloured glass, each pane tinting the same flame differently: the particular version of you that existed for your mother, your childhood friend, an old lover, someone who knew you only for a specific period. Each would have their own colour, their own distortion, but all of them would face inward towards the same flame. And maybe, through all those differing perceptions, you might catch a glimpse of some essential, irreducible self shining through.
What I’d really want to know is the patterns you’d be able to make out about a whole life from these snapshots of a single day. Whether certain qualities would recur across the years, noticed independently by people who never knew one another; whether the shy child at eight could still be detected in the adult at 40, or some tendency that seemed insignificant at 20 would, in retrospect, reveal itself as the beginning of something that came to dominate your life. You might see periods in which you seemed to grow steadily happier, or more withdrawn, more confident, more difficult; traits appearing and disappearing, mutating. And because none of the contributors would know the larger story they were helping to tell, the patterns would emerge accidentally, without the tidiness and hindsight we tend to impose on our own lives.
It would also be a biography of everyone else. Certain names would recur. Partners would enter and exit. Your parents would age in the background. Children would suddenly appear at the table. They would grow up and move away.
This is becoming blue again. Better have the party.