Richard Russo in Bridge of Sighs
I just love Richard Russo – if only I would have read this passage from his Bridge of Sighs the other day, instead just like when I was in therapy, I had to get to it myself and then have it confirmed later:
Odd, how our view of human destiny changes over the course of a lifetime. In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we’re faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we’ll do, but who we’ll be. . . . But at some point all of that changes. Doubt, born of disappointment and repetition, replaces curiosity. In our weariness we begin to sense the truth, that more doors have closed behind than remain ahead, and for the first time we’re tempted to swing the telescope around and peer at the world through the wrong end–though who can say it’s wrong? How different things look then? Larger patterns emerge, individual decisions receding into insignficance. To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy.