50/50 Exercise #20: Found First and Last Lines/Book You Are Currently Reading

It occurred to me today that I’m not as far along as I thought.

I remember a time when I dreamed of what I could do with an extra hundred years, or two hundred, or three. I would become the world’s foremost authority on nineteenth-century French literature. I would develop the patience to cook a soufflé. I would speak flawless Spanish with a perfect Castellaño accent…or with the accent of the aristocrats of Mexico City or Lima, or of the marketplace in San Juan.

I would learn to ski. I would win trophies at singles tennis—in my age bracket, of course, but that’s still a worthy accomplishment at 250.

I imagined that with so much time on my hands, I would develop a taste for poetry, but I have not. I’ve read all the masters in that art, and I can tell the good material from the bad, but I’ve had to concede that I just don’t have a poetic mind. Nor have I learned to paint beyond a passable competence in mimicking the work of the great Expressionists.

On the other hand, I finally worked through the topic that got the best of me in calculus when I first studied it as a small child. It took returning to school three more times—and two more failed tests—before something in my ever-evolving brain clicked into place and I understood not only how the mathematics of series and sequences works, but why I might want to know this stuff. It felt as if I had flown higher and higher until I could not only see over the wall that had stood between me and this obscure knowledge, but from my heightened perspective, I could see how small that wall really is compared to my soaring understanding.

And now I approach my millennial birthday, and I’m surprised to find how many walls remain, how many frontiers of understanding. I thought that by now I would have learned to forgive any offense. I believed that I would be unencumbered by envy, by lust, by anger—all the small-minded weaknesses that riddled my character in the seven decades I call childhood. But though I control these “vices,” understand them, tap their power and put it to good use, they are still here with me 900 years later. What vanity it was to think that we would perfect ourselves! We have only dug deeper toward the heart of our imperfection.

And what about love? What have I learned in all this time? Am I a master of that spectator sport, that science, that field of expertise, that cuisine, that art? From high in orbit, I look down and see one wall that still blocks my view. I read, I reflect, I write speculative essays, and most of all, I practice. I touch many other lives, and from time to time, I let them touch me. And call it love. (p. 379)

The first and last sentences of this text are taken from Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. They can be found on pages 319 and 379 of the Picador trade paperback edition.