If I Stop Living This Life, Everything Bad Comes Right Back

The Cost of Living Like This is a novel by James Kennaway, published in 1969, and set earlier in the 1960’s. It has a protagonist I identified with immediately. He’s called The Economist and he’s a forty-something married man having an affair with a nineteen year-old secretary in his Civil Service office. He has terminal cancer. The novel is a fine, understated but hard-hitting portrayal of what it is like to carry on a regular life with a pain that won’t go away, and every now and then takes over your whole being with its intensity. When we meet The Economist, even the morphine cocktail he carries with him won’t do the trick. Read the novel.

Why would a young man at university identify with a middle-aged man dying of cancer? I had no idea then, but I do now.

For a lot of my life up to age about forty-something, despite whatever emotions I seemed to be having on the surface, my underlying state was emotional confusion, pain, emptiness, and loneliness. Sometimes it would subside, perhaps for days, but then it would come back as distracting and all-encompassing as ever. Kennaway’s character is the only one I have read who goes through that cycle of feeling.

(Sure, if you want, make rude noises about an old man comparing his indulgent adolescent feelings with the genuine suffering of a cancer patient. You have a point. You’re also missing one. You can stop reading at any time.)

I have no idea where that state of confusion, pain and emptiness came from, though there are several candidates: the trauma that happens to some infants when they are circumcised, or a distant father, the family alkie genes, moving schools and homes when young, a bad reaction to the hormones of adolescence… who knows?

What I wanted was for it to stop, and if it wouldn’t stop, then I wanted some distraction or something to make it go away for a time. I didn’t do that consciously, but it was what I was doing.

One distraction is drugs, and I’ve never been near them. Without really knowing it, I realised when I was a teenager that if I ever found a drug that got me out of it, I wouldn’t be coming back in again. Heroin is that drug. So I knew once I started with drugs as a painkiller, I’d wind up on heroin. Junkies aren’t cool. Junkies are, well, junkies. Somewhere in all that pain, I had self-respect enough to not want to be a junkie.

Another distraction is religion, and as a young man I did the Billy Graham thing for a few weeks, until, I think, the guide or whatever they call them, decided that I didn’t really get it. I don’t. I get religion as an intellectual and cultural construct, but not as an emotional experience and certainly not as a social thing. It’s like marriage and following football: I know people do it, I just have no idea why, and never will, because I just don’t understand the words they use when they try to explain it.

Another distraction is people. I did not understand it at the time, but I was using people to try to make the pain, emptiness and confusion go away. People can’t do that for me or anyone else: what I might do with them, from playing Risk! to having sex, might be a distraction, but just hanging with the Bros and Hos can’t. When I met The Crowd at the Dog and Duck Friday night for a drink, The Crowd were just an excuse for the drink. I didn’t know that at the time, but that’s what was happening. After all, only sad alkies drink on their own at home. Using people as painkillers is morally suspect: people are supposed to be treated as ends, not means.

All I wanted was for the pain to go away. That and the practicalities of paying the bills were the two aims I judged everything by. When a combination of sobriety, exercise, ageing, and cultural consumption eases the pain and smooths the logistics of life, that counts as a win.

I have two things I do.

The first is physical exercise. Like all boys of my generation, I thought nothing of a two-hour bike ride in an afternoon, just because. It was what we did. There were a few years I didn’t do any exercise, until I started swimming again in my mid-twenties. This was before gyms were a readily accessible thing. I started weight training when I was thirty-three, and with the exception of about four years or so, when I paid the price in elevated blood sugar levels that turned my head to a fog, I have exercised ever since. Self-respect again.

The second is culture and entertainment: reading, movies, TV, music. I’m good at that. My culture is pretty darn heavy and involving - I have Schiff playing Bach as I write. Jollies the brain up. Not so sure about Bordieu’s book on Manet though, that’s a bit of a wade.

But here’s the thing.

The pain never really goes away.

If I stop living this life, everything bad comes right back. There is no cure for alcoholism, or drug addiction, or poor eating habits, or any of a dozen other things: at best there is a way of living in a way that minimises the impact, denies the habits a chance to get started. Emotional fracked-up-ness is the same.

So when I hear people suggesting that the best thing in life is human relationships, that having sex when I want it will make me feel like a man, that there are other people who can understand what I’m feeling and thinking and that time with them is the best time ever, and all that other stuff… this may all be true, but it doesn’t make the pain go away, and that’s all that matters.