Making your younger self happy

In one of his recently published essays,¹ André Aciman recalls a story he first heard from his father while he was still a 13-year-old boy in Egypt.  I'll try to summarize the story briefly.

An artist is hired to paint the story of Christ, from beginning to end.  He begins with the child Jesus, and after much searching he selects a beautiful, angelic-looking boy as his model.  The work continues for years, as, one by one, the painter finds various models for each of the apostles.  Eventually, when the painter is aged and nearing the end of his career, he needs only one more model, someone to pose as the treacherous apostle, Judas.  Finally, outside a bar,

he spots the most debauched, seedy-looking, bedraggled vagabond who is clearly given to drinking, lechery, and thieving, if not worse.

He offers the bum a small amount to pose for him, and the guy agrees -- payment in advance.  Eventually, as the painting proceeds, the bum gets curious and asks who the painting represents.

After hearing the painter's answer, the would-be Judas begins to weep.  "Why are you crying," asks the painter.  "Years ago you painted me as Jesus," says the man.  "Now look and see what's become of me."

Aciman recalls as a boy being stunned upon being told this story.  He took the story personally, feeling that he -- a nice, smart, Jewish boy -- might have buried within himself the potential of ending up as a disgusting, degenerate bum.  Moreover, he feared that his father had told him the story because the father recognized and worried about that potential in his son.  After all, the "boy Jesus" model probably had looked forward to a great future, never dreaming of  how he would turn out.

The adult Aciman then turns to a photo his father took of him when he was 14 (above).  Did that boy realize that some day his adult self would look back on this photo, envying his own youth and the adventures that still lay ahead?  In his introduction to the same book of essays, Aciman also discusses the photo.  As I quoted from that introduction in an earlier post:

When I look at the black-and-white photo, I feel for that boy of almost six decades ago.  What happened to him?  Whatever did he end up becoming? ... "I've been looking for you," he says.  "I'm always looking for you."

The Jesus/Judas model tells himself "I was born to be this, but now I've become that. ...  I could have continued being the boy I once was, but that was not to be.  I can no longer become what I was meant to be."  

This story reminds me of the novel Canada, by Richard Ford, which I wrote about in 2012.  The young teenager Dell lost his parents when, because of a small debt, they decided to rob a bank.  They were quickly apprehended and sent to prison, leaving Dell essentially an orphan.  Looking back, near the end of a successful career as a school teacher, Dell ruminates:

[B]ecause very few people do rob banks, it only makes sense that the few who do it are destined for it, no matter what they believe about themselves or how they were raised. I find it impossible not to think this way, because the sense of tragedy would otherwise be overpowering to me. Though it's an odd thing to believe about your parents -- that all along they've been the kind of people criminals come from. It's like a miracle in reverse.

The two stories examine a similar situation from different perspectives.  The dissolute model knows that he had a choice.  Somewhere along the line, he made a series of disastrous decisions.  He himself was responsible for his descent from innocent schoolboy to worthless bum.  "I  was born to be this, but now I've become that."   Dell, on the other hand, sees his father's plight differently.  He sees his father as having been predestined to criminal behavior.

I've seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men -- homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement ... -- I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves. It's a theory of destiny and character I don't like or want to believe in. But it's there in me like a hard understory.

Like Aciman, I often stare at photos of myself as a boy.  Like Aciman, there are things I wish I could tell that handsome young kid.  But unlike Aciman, the boy does not seem a stranger to me.  I've obviously learned much and experienced much that my boyhood self couldn't dream of.  But I can remember -- or, at least, I think I can remember -- how I thought and felt at that age.   I feel a continuity between him and me.  

Aciman wonders how that boy in his photo would have felt had he seen himself as an adult.  Because the Aciman family left Egypt forever, shortly after the photo was taken, he feels that young André had a life to live in Alexandria that was brutally cut short, and that the Egyptian Aciman still wanders about in some other plane, seeking to ground himself in reality.  The dissolute Judas model looked back on his innocent boyhood and wept at realizing the horror the boy would have felt had he foreseen the future that lay ahead for him.

Insofar as my 14-year-old self could have forced himself to conceive of ever being elderly, I suspect that his only surprise would be that I'd had more and better experiences than he would have predicted.  I suspect that, unlike many children -- especially today's -- I hadn't created any grand blueprint for my future life.  My goals were all short-term:  get good grades, get into the college of my choice.  Beyond that, I felt that the future would be more like a ride down a river, steering gently to stay in mid-stream, rather than being a lifetime of strenuous efforts to  construct a canal through which I could force my passage.  In general, I had high hopes in a general sense -- but no real expectations in a specific sense.

And that's how things worked out.  I sometimes worry that the fact that my life has evolved relatively smoothly means that I haven't taken on sufficiently difficult challenges.  And yet, I often did accept challenges -- sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.  I suppose I embraced enough challenge that I feel life has often been exciting.  I probably avoided goals that I correctly evaluated as unrealistic, and as a result, my life's low points have been short-lived and not devastating.

Dell would have said that I was predestined to be happy.  Aciman would say I made choices that were, for a guy of my temperament, wise choices.  

As for me, I just smile and pour myself another cup of coffee.

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¹André Aciman, Irrealis, "Unfinished Thoughts on Fernando Pessoa" (2021)