For the Time Being: Reflections on Life and Aging

Marianne and Connell: Sally Rooney’s Normal People is a “hymn to the intensity of being young.” But do the young have the monopoly on powerful emotion?

For Christmas 2018 my brother gave me a copy of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People. Have you read it? I was in my 70th year, and when I read the blurb, I wondered why he had given it to me. In case you missed it, and the BBC TV drama based on it, it is a story about the complex friendship and sexual relationship between two very smart teenagers, set in contemporary Sligo in Ireland, and at Trinity College Dublin where they go to study after leaving school. What possible relevance could this have for me, at my stage of life? I read it though. And I loved it. I loved the sparseness of the plot: seemingly socially-adjusted, sporty, working class boy and friendless, truculent middle class girl have a passionate on-off relationship through their last year at school and then at university, where we witness a reversal in their roles: he shining intellectually but socially out of his depth, she, freed from her oppressive home life appears well adjusted and popular. Nothing much happens. Except that so much happens: the richness of this novel lies in the inner lives of Marianne and Connell; the reader witnesses the power of their passion and the intensity of their feelings.

Why did I enjoy this so much? I wish I could claim it to be nostalgia, but there was no Connell to fire me with passion when I was in school, just the odd snog round the back of the bike sheds that led to nothing much more than slightly enhanced street cred. It might be because of that thing in all of us, that little touch of voyeurism; we don’t get to see what goes on in other people’s bedrooms, and we are certainly not privy to their inner thoughts in the way that Rooney, and the excellent TV production, make possible. In simple, sparing language Rooney gives us access to the deepest of feelings of these young people inhabiting that confusing world between childhood and adulthood.

“When [Connell] talks to Marianne he has a sense of total privacy between them. He could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them, he knows that. Being with her is like opening a door away from normal life and closing it behind him.” (p.7).

It is the depth of this emotional intimacy that did it for me. Is this because it stirred something in me, and if so, what? Envy, maybe — definitely not to be young again, but perhaps to feel once more the intensity of new love. (Although I have had that second-time-around moment, thanks to Mr C.) How often in our lives do we find that one person with whom we can, or even want to, close ourselves away from normal life? I certainly felt a sense of frustration. Despite their strong feelings for each other Marianne and Connell mess up time and time again and I found myself shouting at the page: ‘Connell, just tell her! Tell her why you have to go back to Sligo!’ (Read the book, if you want to know.) Are they socially inept? Or simply too young to process such powerful feelings? Discuss.

“A hymn to the intensity of being young”

Oh, there has been a lot of discussion! Notwithstanding the huge success of the novel, the literary reviews were mixed. What has fascinated me more is the response to the televised drama, especially the spat in the Times between James Marriott, deputy book editor, and David Aaronovitch, columnist and author. Marriott wrote the first piece, on May 4 2020, declaring that Normal People is a “hymn to the intensity of being young” and that “being young is one of the most important things that will ever happen to you” He argues that the experiences and feelings we have in our youth are painful and vivid in a way that they never will be again. Marriott graduated from Oxford in 2014. Aaronovitch, who went up to Oxford in 1973, riposted a few days later, claiming that the “fundamental experiences that shape our lives are gained in our middle and later years.” What do you think? Maybe you need to look up both articles before you can make a decision, or maybe you already have enough life experience to make the call. Before answering that question for myself I feel that I need dig a little deeper. Marriott introduces me to the notion of the ‘reminiscence bump’. I had never heard of it, and Mr C says it sounds like something from phrenology. Time for some research.

Reminiscence bump

During Trump’s presidential campaign an article in The Guardian in 2016 discussed a poll by Morning Consult, reported in the New York Times. In light of Trump’s promise to “make America great again”, 2000 people were asked to name the year in which they thought America had been at its greatest in the past. The results, across the age, cultural and political spectrum, were so disparate as to be unhelpful in shaping political rhetoric, but there was one noticeable pattern: those born in the 1930s and ’40s chose a year in the 1950s as the greatest and those born in the 1960s and ’70s chose a year in the 1980s. Almost all respondents turned to their youth to retrieve a golden moment. Why? Are we programmed to see the past, like Pollyanna, in a glow of positivity, or do we simply store and retrieve memories from our youth more efficiently? There is plenty of research to back up the theory that we remember more vividly our younger days. A systematic review of memory in autobiographical research in 2018 found that

“One of the most consistently observed phenomena in autobiographical memory research is the reminiscence bump: a tendency for middle-aged and elderly people to access more personal memories from approximately 10–30 years of age.”

I was puzzled by the early age at which we begin to store significant memories — 10 years — until I thought about pop music. I started to love it at around the age of 10. Buddy Holly, then Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and the Beatles. “Please Please Me” is the first album I ever bought. I was 14 years old. An article in the New York Times in 2018 recounts research showing that our strongest adult preferences for pop music are established at the age of 13 for girls and 14 for boys. These “songs that bind” shape our musical taste for life. I certainly don’t think my musical taste is stuck in 1963, but my enthusiasm tails off on a sliding scale with the passing years: I appreciate quite a bit of music from the 1970s, some from the ’80s, hardly anything from the ’90s, and I would struggle to name a twenty-first century band. What is more, I can still remember the lyrics to all the songs on that album I bought in 1963, even when I haven’t listened to it in years. How is that possible?

Our early memories are our strongest….

It seems that memories from our earlier years are encoded more strongly, and as a result can be recalled more efficiently and more frequently, than later memories. Why is that? It appears to be a question of identity. The theory goes that we become who we are through a series of events that take place when we are young. We make friends, often for life. We graduate from school or college, we meet our life partner and we set out on a chosen career path. These are new experiences, and we seem to remember the novel much better than the familiar. We are at our most impressionable when we are young; this is the time when we attach huge significance to new experiences as they become deeply embedded in who we are. I remember so vividly my French literature lectures at university, when my eyes — my heart and soul — were opened to new, and discombobulating, ideas. I now understand why I can still talk to you for hours about Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism but can’t even remember the title of the film I saw last week. That relationship between memory and aging is a whole other topic, and one to which I will return.

For the time being, though, let me return to Marianne and Connell. It would be interesting to encounter them in the future, and whether Rooney will oblige with a novel about their middle-aged angst (or lack of it) remains to be seen. (By the way, if this were to happen in real time, I won’t ever know, and that grieves me.) And even if she did, would their inner thoughts be as feverish? Is it not the case that as we emerge into adult life, with a job, a mortgage, the next generation to see through their teenage years, the nurturing of our inner life feels somewhat self-indulgent? We do not know how Marianne and Connell will remember their late teens in another two decades. To what extent will the intensity of their feelings now, have shaped the rest of their lives? Marriott believes that “we are all forged in that frightening, thrilling and unrepeatable time of life”.

….but later memories have more significance

Aaronovitch, already past the foothills of middle age, questions Marriott’s argument. For the young, he says, everything is naturally new, but they do not have the monopoly on new experiences. He cites events in his life that came after the age of 30 — meeting his wife, the birth of his children and the death of his parents — as having huge emotional significance. I can relate to all of that. The birth of a child and the loss of a parent are deeply powerful, seismic moments. They mark the start and the end of an era in our own lives. Do we feel the shock waves any less because we are no longer young when they happen, or do we simply have the inner resources to deal with them better? Do we in fact deal with them? Not everyone finds new parenthood or becoming an orphan an easy transition. I have always been able to process the emotional fall-out from events just so long as they occur in the natural order of things. When that order is disturbed, that is a whole different story, and one to which I will return. However we deal with it, the longer we live, the more stuff happens. The older we become, the richer are the threads and the more deeply they are woven into the tapestry of our lives.

Marianne and Connell’s tapestry, as colourful as the threads may be, is for now sparse in comparison, for no other reason than their youth. The old, as Aaronovitch reminds us, have been young, but the young have never been old. There is a lovely line in Penelope Lively’s children’s novel The Ghost of Thomas Kempe when nine-year-old James realises that Mrs Verity, with stories to tell of her past, has not always been an old woman. Old people come in layers, like onions, he muses. Lively is one of my favourite writers, not least because of her fascination for the relationship between time and memory. We all need a past, she says. That’s where our sense of identity comes from.

Our multi-layered identity

Ah…. Back to identity. Forged in our late teens as we find our feet in the grown-up world, for sure, but forming multiple layers that are both spatial and temporal. We can be manager at work and carer at home, for example, and we can follow a wild period in our teens with a serious career path in our twenties. Our identity comes from our past. Marriott is right to state that being young is one of the most important things that will ever happen to you. But so is being 30, and 40. Middle age is important too, even old age. We all build up layers, just like Mrs Verity. We all have stories to tell. And those stories continue to shape us throughout all of our lives.

What do you think? Can you pinpoint a time in your life when your identity was forged most strongly, or do you see it as a work in progress? Do the young have a monopoly on powerful emotion?