Is that punny enough? I hope so. Someone really needs to help me with these titles. Anyway, the point:
There’s a tradition I have, that I’ve had since high school. It’s weird to think that it’s been almost ten years since freshman year, and yet so many of those memories still feel so fresh and vivid. Partly, that’s due to my nostalgic nature. I really only have a few things that keep me connected to that place. A couple of teachers become friends, the memory of the one who didn’t live long enough to be my friend in adulthood, only two friends who’ve stuck with me since then, and a book. A dangerous book, but a book that I make a point of rereading every year, either at the start of trout season (if I remember to go) or on my first trip to Vermont. I am now in Vermont, just returned from a sunrise (you’ll get that pun in a second) fly-fishing trip, and have just finished my reread of The Sun Also Rises.
I understand there’s an inherent danger in someone trying to be a writer also trying to discuss books, but here we go.
There are a few books that I’ve read which have stuck with me like this, usually for their emotional impact. I like rereading Hyperion, chiefly because it was the first thing I read that actually made me feel terrified. Pride and Prejudice was not the first book to make me laugh, but from the time I’ve read it to now it’s aged like wine and just keeps getting funnier. I think Hitchhiker’s Guide was the first book to make me laugh.
I can recite the whale scene from memory.
The Sun Also Rises was the first book to make me cry. Whenever we read it in high school, I can remember exactly where I was an even some of the people I was with when I finished it. It was something like a gut punch, compounded by at its time topical nature (ah, the drama of high school), and the speed with which I read it (my most recent reread took me under three days). In those pages, there was a relatability, and there still is, not so much for the characters themselves but for their experiences. Some of those experiences have become ever so much more relatable as I’ve gotten older (it’s a headache, I promise, nothing to do with the four absinthes last night), and some that I appreciate for how it made me feel the first time I read it. For that reason, rereading a book is like getting back on a rollercoaster. You know the climb, you know the falls, but it doesn’t make it any less fun. Although, whether or not The Sun Also Rises remains as topical for me as it did in high school depends on what mood I am in when I sit down to read it again.
This time it was a bit more painful, for a few reasons.
Nostalgia is a kind of pleasant pain, and all the more dangerous for it. That’s why rereading this book in particular is so often correlated to the fishing season. Much like in the text, it’s a bittersweet combination of something so incredibly peaceful as fishing serving as an escape from the world’s woes and the harsh realities waiting for us when we return from our trip. But that break, and, however brief, that escape, is essential. The Sun Also Rises displays that dichotomy well, between the simple life we desire an escape to and the chaos of the lives we live that nevertheless seems to draw us back in.
Sign the wire with love, you know. That’s all there is to it.
It’s funny, me rereading this while I’m in Vermont and looking for peace, if only because our lives are theoretically not as chaotic as they used to be. At least, mine isn’t. There is a global pandemic, and people are dying, and people are working themselves to death, but the other part of the world, the part of which I am a member, seems almost frozen. We’re waiting to see what happens, we’re waiting and watching the war wage, and our tension comes from the uncertainty of the future and the uneasiness about the past.
That might be the other reason this reread felt different than the others. There’s the pain of nostalgia, of the world that was that we know when whatever we’re experiencing ends we can’t really go back to, there’s the topical kind of pain related directly to the contents of the book, and then there’s that feeling of being stuck. Of being frozen in uncertainty and drink and escapism and just… waiting.
Of being a lost generation.
I think I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts my trend towards melodrama, but my point stands. We’re looking now, reexamining, the things we value, and were our values come from. Like wine, like workers’ rights, like stuffed dogs, like healthcare, like good flies, like restaurants, like how to spend our time and how to spend all the time we’ve got left. We hope there’s an answer, a solution, almost, to that increasingly sinking feeling of uncertainty that threatens to give its way to despair.
Maybe there will be.
There’s hope, always, in what we’re able to accomplish as people. Some of us have used our time staying at home well, like we’ve spent the time before we’ve had to stay at home well. Some of us know we haven’t. And some aren’t sure anymore because we’re no longer sure what to value or how to evaluate life and all the time left in it.
But there will be an end to the dark times, and there will be a world after, and we will all have a say in how it gets rebuilt.
The sun will rise again.
Isn’t it pretty to think so?