During high school and early college years, I was devoted to rock climbing. I did pull-ups, I dieted. I worked at a climbing gym and entered competitions. I wasn’t bad, I wasn’t great, I just loved the whole climbing gestalt.
One summer, I worked in a camping shop and my employee discount enabled me to afford what’s called a rack: a bunch of equipment that traditional climbers use to prevent themselves from falling when they’re climbing outdoors on routes without bolts. Everything was new, everything gleamed. I didn’t get a chance to use it before summer wrapped, so, one August night in the suburbs, in the dark, about a week before returning to college, I clipped everything to a piece of webbing and dragged it up and down the driveway for twenty minutes. Because I didn’t want the other climbers thinking it was brand new and untested, because what might that say about me?
As a young person, I was petrified of seeming a wannabe, a newbie, a tourist. In all things I wanted to be, I wanted to be them a priori, born somehow knowing all the cues. Climbing, poetry, music. I compulsively read liner notes and scoured old magazines. I bought the books one was supposed to read, and if I didn’t read them, I’d still crack the spines, to make them appear heavily used.
I knew then it was pathetic, and in retrospect it seems very pathetic, though now in a manner I like.
A recent episode of the Apology Magazine podcast featured poet Eileen Myles talking about a new anthology they edited regarding “Pathetic Literature.” Pathetic in this case was a semi-noble thing, almost a badge of distinction: works of literature linked together by a theme of humans being pained or weird, sentimental or too gleeful. Pathetic from wanting too hard. Pathetic from feeling too hard. Works – truly excellent works – by Franz Kafka and Dodie Bellamy, or a poem by Ariana Reines. It’s the pathetic-ness of keeping a diary, or panting on Twitter. There are distinctions, of course. Feeling tortured is definitely pathetic; being tortured is not.
Probably the most I ever felt pathetic, felt a wannabe, was when my partner and I moved to France. I’d gotten a job at an advertising agency. The position required me to attend meetings and communicate in French – and I didn’t speak the language well. Speaking a language you don’t know well means operating naked, always in need; you have the vocabulary of a six-year-old. I hated how I seemed. At the same time, did anyone hate me? Of course not; if anything, it dawned on me that people appreciated that I was making the effort – and didn’t think much about me after that.
Which has to be one of the great lessons of adulthood: realizing that everyone’s pathetic in their own way, and in most cases so self-interested, they’re almost never thinking about or noticing anybody else.
In tomorrow’s Sunday supplement for supporters:
An autumnal 2005 pop album for summer 2023, and a mix of jump blues if you wind up stuck in a hot kitchen
An app to put Paris in your living room
A spy novel for the beach and some other recent favorites
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from writer Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ things to love, along with a monthly longer piece sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now. His latest novel is The Last Kid Left. Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored in a Bookshop list.