Quote of the Day | August 19, 2008: A Self-Destructively Romantic Man. . .

From Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, 1968:

My friends were younger then and did not know that this was this, that that; though some of us might have been acute enough to know that though Detroit owned America, Detroit didn't yet own us; we had the youthful and heartfelt hopes of being "our own men." With youth's arrogant confidence that we were so markedly dissimilar from those shovelers, we walked in that remembered brilliance, shouting, "Shovel, you fucking dummies!" That the shovelers might know our four-letter bravado was not be trifled with, we then pounded each other on the back and roared with haughty laughter: a strained camaraderie designed to deter any of the braver shovelers from approaching us. Making our way to the next saloon, we drank draft beer in comfortable booths, cribbed and passed off as our own a favorite professor's remark on Plato or Aquinas or Twain, and continued to sneer at "dummies" unable to see the beauty and completeness of a world in which one did nothing but walk about in the snow, drink draft beer in crowded booths, and try to understand a world not governed by automatic transmissions.

Now I see in that laughter a good deal of desperation and sadness. About to leave the haven of our separate universities and be thrown onto the brutal free-spinning of the world, as we walked arm in arm through te snow, we carried with us, if only unconsciously, the knowledge that it would be our last holiday together; and we drank and laughed and sneered with the resolute sadness of men who knew that tomorrow we'd be trying to free our own mortgaged Buicks from our own snow-locked drives. That is what most of us ended doing. I didn't; but I don't question that my friends were right and I wrong, that they were happy and I was not, that theirs was the hard and mine the easy way. What always saddened me on confronting them was the surety that had I been foolish enough to bring up "old times," none would have allowed himself a memory of sticking his finger into the vaporous and flaky air and shouting, "Shovel, you fucking dummies!" A self-destructively romantic man, I accepted our jeering defiance as a fact; forever.

Tags: Frederick Exley, Fred Exley, A Fan's Notes, Literature