The passing of time lies on the thin edge of a knife
An infinite ramble; perhaps part two of my nostalgia series
Earlier this week, I told a friend that when I was in my twenties, I thought that the world was small and life was big. And that more recently, the world seems bigger again – but that life feels a lot smaller. She pushed me on this.
I explained that during that time in my life, I did not necessarily take notice of the social boundaries that fence me in now. The concept of home was still just that. A concept: fluid, ever-changing, untethered and something I was in search of. Relationships were similarly as flimsy; I moved from intense moments of passion for one person to the next, simultaneously convinced I was in love and perpetually running away from what it might feel like to have someone love me back. Friendships were bountiful and endless, and did not necessarily rely on my staying put to be maintained. Work was not something that defined me, nor something that rewarded me particularly in pay or in purpose. Experiences were big and messy and bodily and felt in real time. I moved from place to place in a way that made the world feel more manageable to explore – it was amazing and dramatic and also sad and painful and lonely and I sometimes wish I could go back.
Of course what I lacked back then was perspective or any true understanding of myself. I was self-indulgent and didn’t like to take responsibility for anything. I was young, dumb, broke and in love with life, even when I felt that life really did not love me back.
Now, a little older, a little wiser, a few lockdowns and years of living alone in the same flat for four years under my belt, the world is big again. Places that once seemed within my grasp feel unreachable. Life has become more localised: one place for my vegetables, another for my eggs. The good wine shop. The weekly roast. The cycle into the studio. Dinners with friends on repeat. Cooking in my kitchen. To be clear, this is a very good life. I love my little life, and that is not to diminish it, but to prove that it is mine and mine alone – that I can hold onto it and find comfort in its goodness. Whereas once my life was dictated by drama, by stories of misadventures, by brand new and piercing failures, by searing unrequited romances; now it is more full of ease and comfort. Financial stability. A real home. I wonder if this is exactly what unsettles me.
The passing of time lies on the thin edge of a knife. Veer too far one way, and all is hopeless. Lean the other way and it’s full of infinite hope. Our perspectives change as we grow older, the trope of naive idealism morphing into jaded realism, which happens faster and sooner than we might think. It strikes me suddenly in rewatching Goodbye First Love, a 2011 film by Mia Hansen-Løve. When Camille – 15 years old, enraptured in the throes of young, unfiltered, all-consuming love – quietly gazes into space with a look of all-too-familiar melancholy, declares: “Love is all I care about. It’s all I live for.” Her mother does not dream of indulging her. “Spare me,” she says flatly, as she continues cleaning the house.
I must have been in my very early twenties when I first watched this film. Back then I would have felt Camille’s pain; I would have been in the same situation, dramatically throwing myself on a bed, sighing with melancholy, all too ready to put my heart on the line again and again to feel even just an inch of passion. Now, a decade on, could I say the same? I’m much more avoidant, too risk-averse; self-cocooned in my independence, I prefer to shield my heart from potential outside threats.
The film continues in this tempestuous whirlwind of a first romance. Infatuation turns to intimacy; lust into love. The couple fight about Sullivan leaving her for South America with his friends, his own vision of escape (“to become a real person,” as he puts it) spoiling Camille’s desire to keep them sealed in their own little world. The way she looks at him when he cooks dinner for her in the farmhouse during their final summer together, as if he is the only thing in the world that matters or even exists. That summer ends. He leaves and eventually stops writing to her, and her pain at losing him is so great and so brutal. Her father sits next to her hospital bed and pleads in a whisper, “Il faut tourner la page”. It’s time to move on. Camille goes to university to study architecture, falls for her professor and ten years later meets Sullivan again. They’re adults now; but can it ever be the same? Time has taken its toll.
The English name of the film feels like a premonition. In French, it is Un Amour De Jeunesse, which translates as ‘young love’ – a far more wistful and hopeful title. But the cynic in me likes the realism of saying goodbye to a first love. Time passes. It simply must be done.
I think of the subtle shift between youth and adulthood as the difference between loudly experiencing and quietly observing. A character who seems to be on the cusp of both is Julie in The Worst Person In The World, a film I watched for the first time this past weekend. Released exactly 10 years later than Goodbye First Love, it deals with similar themes: the passage of time and ‘urban youth adrift, searching for meaning, grasping at immortality’.
I had avoided it for a while, knowing it would resonate quite pointedly, the protagonist being someone in her late twenties who steers away from taking responsibility for her own life by flitting from one thing to the next, never seeing anything through. Still naive enough to jump into things with wild abandon, Julie felt like the version of myself that I left behind upon turning 30.
There are two scenes that seemed to sum up this strange hinterland between youth and adulthood.
The first is when Julie crashes the wedding alone and meets Eivind. The way she slips in so casually, pouring herself a glass of wine and observing the space. How she boldly enters a conversation with two women and mocks the rules of parenting. The way Eivind watches her and she meets his gaze with this knowingness – as if she could predict how the rest of the night would unfold. The night is charged with desire, eroticism and playfulness. It bypasses the young, head-over-heels, saccharine fantasies of romance and rushes straight towards intimacy. It’s an interaction that feels like it belongs in this liminal space between naive youth and practical reality. The night plays out as if time is suspended. There is awareness of external forces – respective partners are acknowledged and boundaries are blurred but lines are never strictly crossed. I remember nights like these. I dream of nights like these.
But of course the illusion of a night like that can never contend with the disillusion that ensues. And if the first scene is an idyllic fantasy twinkling in the midsummer heat, the second scene is a crashing of reality that rains down like a storm.
After the iconic pausing of time when Julie imagines running through the streets of Oslo to spend the day with Eivind, she returns back to her body to end her relationship with Aksel, her much older graphic novelist boyfriend. You can tell that she’s anticipating relief at untethering herself from this life that they had made for themselves. The prospect of kids. The descent into real adulthood. It was bad timing, she tells him. He’s bewildered. The moments after unravel in a heartbreakingly real way. They talk. They fight. They hold each other. They entwine their bodies just to remember what it feels like. I feel like a spectator in my own life. Like I’m playing a supporting role in my own life. I felt that.
In an interview, the film’s writer and director Joachim Trier says: “Melancholy is about time passing, and that is very much what this film is about. You think you live in infinity, but at some point you don’t. Choices will be made for you if you don’t make them yourself. And loss is necessary to find a place of acceptance for yourself. Unfortunately you have to go through some shit to accept groundedness. I think this is what Julie has to go through.”
He goes on: “I’m rooting for the romantic aspect of her character and her dreaminess, but I see it gets her into trouble. You’re imperfect and you end up hurting people—that's what’s interesting to me.”
For me, this is what makes Julie so relatable. That her relentless desire to experience life is so wonderfully impulsive. It quite literally propels her from one situation to the next, sometimes with little care of how it impacts people around her. It’s natural for one to be selfish in their own story - of course we all inhabit our own main character energy. But we cannot live on impulse alone. In many ways, life relies on this constant dance between wistful, hopeful dreaminess and a more grounded, practical realism. These days I can feel myself leaning more towards the latter, when I should be making more space for the former.
Is it that the passage of time changes what we desire or simply how we desire it? Perhaps when we’re green and fresh to the world, not yet aware of ourselves or our place in the world, we seek out intensity and passion and lust and romance no matter the consequences. As we grow older, as past loves build up and our hearts break, mend themselves, tear again, do we inherently look for something more stable, more finite, more grounded in reality? Do we actively avoid the risks, despite knowing that risk is at the heart of love?
Thankfully I haven’t quite reached the severity of Camille’s mother in Goodbye First Love. But I’m also not nostalgic for those halcyon days of a first love – you know, the ones where it feels physically painful to be without someone. What I do dream about is loudly experiencing life like I used to. Of meeting a stranger and letting time hang in suspense for a time. Amongst a life full of responsibilities, friends settling down, the ever-changing goalposts of success in an ever-changing world, I have to remind myself not to lose that sense of wonder – of blind faith and wistful hope. Right now I’d like to be Julie, pausing time just to catch my breath; so I can run in the direction of something good, something freeing, something unknown.