A young woman takes a photo of an unremarkable building with her phone, her parents watching from a few feet away.
I work at a university, have for a long time now, and spring means new grass and trees refreshing themselves on campus. The grounds fill with students reading books and laughing with each other, punctuated by faculty and staff eating their salads and bowls. Spring also means admitted students arrive on campus hoping to see themselves, or a version of themselves, inhabiting these spaces. Vertiginous on the edge of their enlarging selves, these future students usually take photos of a some random building because they’re not sure what else to do.
Admitted Students Day at Q’s choice of college fell on a beautiful spring Saturday in April about a week before she turned 18. Q wants to attend a small liberal arts college in the Northeast ensconced in something like woods as long as those woods aren’t in New York State. This college town could be scissored from a travel brochure — somewhat sleepy, thoroughly cute, definitely different from New York City. The campus sits on a river where it bends and swells briefly into a reasonable pond, then runs over a break back into its smaller self. From most parts of campus, you can hear the water falling from pond to river, the kind of natural ambient noise that Q dreams of in a college soundtrack for studying literature. Spring was everywhere, in fact — the trees fat with leaves doing their thing of exchanging sunlight for sugar, the grass a green that could only be described as optimistic.
Since Q applied via early decision, she is committed to attend this college, but we still wanted to go so that she could remind herself why she chose it, so she could see if she could see a version of herself there. We also went because sometimes Q wants us to be right next to her for some things and a little farther off but still around for others. This day was a little of both.
The joy of her choice returned when we visited, but also, I think, the reasonable fear of the next. All the studying in high school, the advanced classes, the clubs and the fellowships, the practice ACTs, the personal statements drafted and ditched and redrafted — all that stuff was in service of an abstract notion of going to college. But here was the campus she would arrive at in the fall, the real physical location of where she would begin to pull on the long strand of adulthood, all those remote ideas condensed into actual places and people.
She took it well. She went to a mock English class in which they discussed a poem, and she came bounding out alive with thinking. “I learned so much about poetry just in that one hour,” she said. She later went to another mock class, this time in history, and was a little bored. Ah, the true experience of college.
Seem like each of us has new admissions in 2023. My wife and I both have new jobs, Q goes off to college, M continues to reckon with whether he should go back to his university or continue to bet on his dream of making a life in music. My wife and I will likely be alone in the house for the first time in a long time beginning in September. The kids have been the stars we’ve charted our paths by for so long that the heavens seem more remote than ever while the techtonic plates beneath us do their shifting.
We visited many colleges with Q over the past several months, and we made time during each visit to stop at a local bookstore, preferably one for used books. Q often judged the viability of the school in no small part on the number and quality of local bookstores, and most of the small college towns passed easily. I’m a sucker for used bookstores too, and I’ve taken lately to picking up books of poetry, possibly to fill in the hole that Q will soon make with her leaving.
Or something like that. After the info session and campus tour of Middlebury College, we went to Monroe Street Books, a gigantic and chaotic used bookstore just north of town. It’s there that I came across Louise Glück’s collection Averno. I’ve read just a little of Glück’s work before, but this book hit me pretty square in the heart and head. Averno (or Avernus) is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the Romans as the entrance to Hades, a passageway to the underworld taken by Virgil and Odysseus and all those who leave us. The poems in this collection take on cycles, transitions, passages, grief, memory, the haziness of before once you’re in the after.
So much of this collection and its preoccupations seduces my thinking, but I keep returning to one poem. The first section of Averno begins with “October,” a six-part reckoning with the cyclical turn toward decay, the inevitable aging and decline of the body. Part 5 of “October” (included below) resonates in many ways, but mainly because it captures so much of growing old and the moments in which we look back from it. Perhaps the main curse of becoming an adult is realizing how huge parts of the world are forever breaking or broken, how boring that fact is — what the poem’s narrator calls the “bland / misery of the world” — and how one feels called upon to do something about it. The artist sees the need for more beauty in the world, feels the obligation to “restore” it (as it has been destroyed, presumably by us). But hope doesn’t seem to provide the raw materials of beauty: How could our experiences suggest that hope is the correct posture to take toward a broken world, a world tilted toward oblivion? After all, hope is “a device to refute / perception”.
All this sounds pretty depressing, especially since near the beginning the poem tells us that it can’t give us beauty but can provide candor. Looking a little more closely, though, I think the candor, the glow, the poem provides is about the connection poetry and writing can build between us and between our past and future selves. As someone who has spent probably too much time thinking about thinking, I read the first part of Glück’s poem as a meditation on how we can feel sequestered in our heads, our thoughts occurring to ourselves “behind the trees, iron / gates of the private houses, / the shuttered rooms”, even when with companions But Glück’s response is not to remain within these gates but to be struck by the realization: “I was young here.” And when young, not alone.
We have talked at length in our house, particularly Q and I, about our stories and who owns them. When I get to thinking too much, which is more often than I’d like, I arrive at the conclusion that a self just is a told story. After all, we each begin as stories told by others — “he tends to lose things” or “she is the right kind of stubborn” — stories that shape as much as they report. To unfold as a person is either to live according to these inherited myths about oneself or to rewrite them, to explain oneself into full being.
I used to write often about M&Q, telling their stories for them as I went about the work of understanding myself, but as they’ve gotten older they’ve taken greater ownership over their characters as they should. I asked Q if she would be okay with me writing about her admitted-students day, and she agreed with the caveat that I treat her experience as not subservient to my own. I have tried, and continue to try, to puzzle out how to do that. I’ve left some things out so that they may belong to Q, or rather so that she can decide whether they should belong to her.
Here’s something that belongs to us all: Q and so many new students like her find themselves at moments in which the abstract notion of becoming an adult collapses vividly into the the physical classroom, an assigned XL twin bed, a specific suite of soft drink choices in the dining hall. But this moment is not so much a collapse as an inversion — when young, adulthood seems far off, an impractical idea lumbering, slowly, toward you. When it finally arrives, childhood suddenly becomes remote, intangible, receding into the distance. To see it, you have to shield your eyes and squint.
I gave Q a copy of Averno for her 18th birthday so that we may both share the same words as well as the moment where and when we found them. And she has literally ridden the subway by herself so many times, reading all number of books, the pages formidable against the world. Q will go away to college and then to what comes after, and she will come back to New York. She will ride the subway. “I was young here,” she will think to herself. And she will know, even from the distance of adulthood, that she was not alone, her young now impossible self not looking into the dark but safe in the candor of the page.
5.
(From “October,” included in Averno, by Louise Glück)
It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.
I am
at work, though I am silent
The bland
misery of the world
bounds us on either side, an alley
lined with trees; we are
companions here; not speaking,
each with his own thoughts;
behind the trees, iron
gates of the private houses,
the shuttered rooms
somehow deserted, abandoned,
as though it were the artist’s
duty to create
hope, but out of what? what?
the word itself
false, a device to refute
perception— At the intersection,
ornamental lights of the season.
I was young here. Riding
the subway with my small book
as though to defend myself against
this same world:
you are not alone,
the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.