Haha, my existential crisis was closer to "Why even bother, why not die now?" than "Oh my god, I'm going to die, and I can't stop it, halp." I read a fair amount of fiction in my teenage years, but while a great deal of it was qualitatively good, very little touched me personally. I didn't really have a favorite book until very recently.
The most affecting book I've ever read was a YA book I encountered just last year, at the not-really-teenaged age of twenty, which as a matter of fact does contain a passage in which a rambly teenager angsts about death, or rather, about life. The novel doesn't directly deal with death, but this passage was the first thing to come to mind when I read this post, so here it is if you want it. Copiously excerpted and abridged here.
"Then I walked into a small room with only four paintings, and I remembered those paintings from the last time I had been in the National Gallery, which was on my eighth-grade class trip to Washington. They are by Thomas Cole and are called The Voyage of Life. Have you seen them?"
"No," she said. "I don't believe I have."
"They depict the four ages of man: childhood, youth, manhood, and old age. In each one a figure in a boat is floating down a river and is guided by an angel. [..] In the Manhood painting the stream has turned into a raging river, and the landscape is rocky and barren. It's dusk and the sky is full of storm clouds. The youth is now a man and he's still standing up in the boat, but now his hands are clasped in prayer as the boat heads toward the rapids. The angel is far away, looking down through a hole in the clouds, watching the boat as it plunges forward. It's very creepy. In the final painting the boat enters from the opposite side of the canvas. It's hard to say what time it is, because the sky is full of dark clouds except for far in the distance, where there are shafts of light falling. It's some twilit time outside of time. The river is about to flow calmly into a huge dark sea. An old man sits in the boat and the angel floats right above him, pointing toward the dark sea and sky. In the distance another angel looks down from the clouds. The old man's hands are still clasped, but it is hard to know if he's praying, or beseeching the angel to save him before he floats off into the huge creepy darkness."
I paused.
[...]
"I was shocked when I saw them again, exactly as they had been, in that same little room. I couldn't believe that such hokey paintings would be on permanent view at the National Gallery. And then I had the irrational feeling that they had not been, that somehow someone knew I was coming back and had just rehung them. That it was some sort of trap or something. But I knew that wasn't true. I knew that they had hung there--I guess it was only five years, but it seemed like a very long time. You can't go backward in time, I know that. But that's what I felt I had done. Everything else sort of dropped away, those five years and the entire world, and I felt like I was two people. Seriously. I could feel what I felt when I was thirteen looking at the paintings, and I could feel what I felt then. I stayed in the room for a very long time. I kept thinking, I should go now, but I didn't. A guard kept coming in and looking at me. And then I got upset because I realized I wanted to be in the last painting, Old Age. I wanted to be in the boat floating into darkness. I wanted to skip the Manhood boat. The man in that boat looked terrified, and I couldn't understand what the point was: why crash through those treacherous rapids along a river that only flowed into darkness, death? I wanted to be in the boat with the old man, with all the danger behind, with the angel near me, guiding me toward death. I wanted to die."
("Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You," Peter Cameron)
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Date: 2012-05-14 06:28 pm (UTC)The most affecting book I've ever read was a YA book I encountered just last year, at the not-really-teenaged age of twenty, which as a matter of fact does contain a passage in which a
ramblyteenager angsts about death, or rather, about life. The novel doesn't directly deal with death, but this passage was the first thing to come to mind when I read this post, so here it is if you want it. Copiously excerpted and abridged here."Then I walked into a small room with only four paintings, and I remembered those paintings from the last time I had been in the National Gallery, which was on my eighth-grade class trip to Washington. They are by Thomas Cole and are called The Voyage of Life. Have you seen them?"
"No," she said. "I don't believe I have."
"They depict the four ages of man: childhood, youth, manhood, and old age. In each one a figure in a boat is floating down a river and is guided by an angel. [..] In the Manhood painting the stream has turned into a raging river, and the landscape is rocky and barren. It's dusk and the sky is full of storm clouds. The youth is now a man and he's still standing up in the boat, but now his hands are clasped in prayer as the boat heads toward the rapids. The angel is far away, looking down through a hole in the clouds, watching the boat as it plunges forward. It's very creepy. In the final painting the boat enters from the opposite side of the canvas. It's hard to say what time it is, because the sky is full of dark clouds except for far in the distance, where there are shafts of light falling. It's some twilit time outside of time. The river is about to flow calmly into a huge dark sea. An old man sits in the boat and the angel floats right above him, pointing toward the dark sea and sky. In the distance another angel looks down from the clouds. The old man's hands are still clasped, but it is hard to know if he's praying, or beseeching the angel to save him before he floats off into the huge creepy darkness."
I paused.
[...]
"I was shocked when I saw them again, exactly as they had been, in that same little room. I couldn't believe that such hokey paintings would be on permanent view at the National Gallery. And then I had the irrational feeling that they had not been, that somehow someone knew I was coming back and had just rehung them. That it was some sort of trap or something. But I knew that wasn't true. I knew that they had hung there--I guess it was only five years, but it seemed like a very long time. You can't go backward in time, I know that. But that's what I felt I had done. Everything else sort of dropped away, those five years and the entire world, and I felt like I was two people. Seriously. I could feel what I felt when I was thirteen looking at the paintings, and I could feel what I felt then. I stayed in the room for a very long time. I kept thinking, I should go now, but I didn't. A guard kept coming in and looking at me. And then I got upset because I realized I wanted to be in the last painting, Old Age. I wanted to be in the boat floating into darkness. I wanted to skip the Manhood boat. The man in that boat looked terrified, and I couldn't understand what the point was: why crash through those treacherous rapids along a river that only flowed into darkness, death? I wanted to be in the boat with the old man, with all the danger behind, with the angel near me, guiding me toward death. I wanted to die."
("Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You," Peter Cameron)