Portrait of a. . .?

Don't read Henry James. There are better things to do with one's time. However, I'm reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady just now, and his writing style does begin to grow on one. This is still not an excuse for you to read Henry James. It isn't that I don't love to picture sun-warmed stone benches and tangled rose vines in Florence, don't misunderstand me. I'd just rather fill in the details for myself and skip the pages where he tries to bend my imaginative faculty to his too-vigorous descriptions.

I'm thinking, as usual, about my life. I'm bored. I find that in trying to carefully keep the balance between prudential living and passionate adventurism I continually manage to do nothing at all. This is a problem because, like I said, I'm bored. I always admire the friends who pursue what sounds good to them--the ones who seem to discredit all the reasons against adventure. I apparently ought to marry the reasons against adventure because I love them so much. Sometimes I ask myself what I'd do if I could do whatever my heart desired. The answer doesn't seem to be so different than what I'm preparing to do: go to grad school, become fluent in French, and live abroad. But, I'd do it more carelessly perhaps. With a truer zest for life, with more expectation of goodness.

The future has almost ceased to interest me. That is, except for those moments when I'm still curious about how I'll "turn out". At 25, am I finally nearing the point when I can no longer ask such questions? At which point, exactly, will I be turned? At 30? I feel that the older I get, the more my possibilities diminish, yet I don't know what the possibilities have been or are currently. But I am getting sidetracked.

I do not like regret. I do not like it, because I believe it has no cure. In college, I denied myself many pleasures for the greater pleasure of being a good student. Do not ask me what it means to be a good student. I have asked myself that question so many times I couldn't make you a decent answer. However, the point remains. I pursued (and I'm glad of it still) academic rigor at the expense of having a good time. Well, now my academic rigors have subsided, at least for a while, and I am still not having a good time. I'm working full-time again, as I do every summer, and finding it delightful in many ways. The great difference between this year and last is that I'm not frantically reading ahead--or generally angsty about the duration of my degree.I'm finished now. This is a glorious truth which I frequently turn to ponder in my soul. It maketh the heart glad.

But, the point. I expected greater responsibilities after college. I expected to have to act like a grown-up. Although, as I've been paying for most of the costs of my maintenance for years not much has changed there.

The thing I also expected, which has turned out to be a grave disappointment, was to find waiting for me the pleasures I disdained to get all of those books read.

It isn't here. Here is a 40-hour work week and aimless free time after hours. Here are friends who live too far away or who are too busy with their marriages or careers to indulge in the pleasures of the life I've so long postponed.

Here, now, with wings finally unfurled, I find that I've not escaped the cage. It was a different place, with my wings submissively folded in, but now they are open and restless for wind. They scrape the prison bars and a few feathers are torn loose and drift to the floor.

I made a rule before graduating against parenthetical living. Parenthetical living being, of course, my only skill and glory. So I ask myself, am I waiting in vain for a time when life will be more accessible? I hope not, because that time will not come, I'm certain of this now.

A friend of mine once remarked, after spontaneously piercing her eyebrow at 25, that if you miss youthful folly when you're young, you mayn't make up for it later. It's too late then. Is it too late now?

I so want to enjoy myself. I have known keen intellectual pleasures over the past seven years, yes, but other avenues of existence have been wanting. It is time to turn down other lanes if I have not lost the way.

I want to fly.