To Be Somebody

Reflections on middle age

I have only one distinct memory of someone asking me what I wanted to be. It was my uncle, and we were standing in the kitchen of the comfortable home in Toronto where he lived with his wife and two children. I did not have an immediate answer because I had not yet vividly imagined my future self. My thoughts hovered indecisively around several vague notions before I abruptly declared an aspiration out loud. Having just returned from my “gap year” in Europe, I abruptly decided that my ideal future was to be a journalist, working from Paris.

For the following twenty-seven years, it seemed that my future self was always ahead of me. I kept driving toward that person and yet he was always disappearing, like the taillights of a truck sinking from sight in the valleys on the highway in front. Then, around the time of my forty-fifth birthday, I became aware that my future had arrived. I was sitting in a car in a nondescript parking lot in Edmonton, Alberta, while my wife was at an adjacent clinic getting a vaccination. Our first (and at that time only) child was in daycare. 

Temporarily free of any responsibilities, I passed the time by reading Red Pill by Hari Kunzru. The narrator had also just become aware of his middle age. He described it as that moment when you realize “your condition—physically, intellectually, socially, financially—is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story.”

By this point in life, it was very clear that I was not going to be a journalist in Paris. Yet it was also true that this was no longer my aspiration. I was not dissatisfied with my situation, but nor was I fully satisfied. I asked myself: what have I become? Where can I go from here? I became aware of a gnawing anxiety that was exacerbated by the growing heat of the car interior. I turned on the engine and the air conditioning.

At the 2024 Grammys ceremony, Tracy Chapman sang a song she had originally released in 1988—“Fast Car”:

“So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk…”

A few seconds later came the lyrics that millions of listeners were expecting:

“I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone.” 

It took me less than ten seconds on Twitter (X) to find someone responding to exactly this sentiment. “It's the ‘be someone, be someone, be someone’ part of Fast Car that always gets me,” wrote author Richard Mirabella. 

I started to see and hear these words everywhere, especially in shows for children. In the film Ballerina, created in a Montreal studio called L’Atelier Animation, the character of Félicie, an eleven-year-old orphan, yearns to become a professional dancer. This is an uplifting movie for children, and so there’s seldom any doubt about how this will play out. After overcoming many obstacles, Félicie achieves her dream, eventually landing the role of Clara in The Nutcracker at the Paris Opera Ballet. To reinforce the inspiring theme, the music of Chantal Kreviazuk crescendos in the background. The song is called, “Be Somebody.” 

This is not an uncommon lyric. The Jam released a song in 1978 called “To Be Someone.” (“To be someone must be a wonderful thing / A famous footballer / a rock singer / or a big film star.”) There is a 2019 song called “Be Someone” by Camelphat with an accompanying music video that draws a direct parallel between a priest in a church and a rockstar on stage, both of whom have adoring congregations.

It’s clear there is a shadow side to being somebody. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom Ripley, a con artist, strays from his social class, pretending to be a Princeton classmate of Dickie Greenleaf, the son of a wealthy shipping magnate. This spurs him to commit a series of deceptions and crimes. Very deep into the 1999 film adaptation, Ripley confides to his lover, Peter: “I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.” 

But neither that movie nor any of those songs explained how it was that a person became somebody. I wanted a painstaking and detailed account of how it actually happened. And I wanted this account to be situated in a moral framework that was more complex than either the Talented Mr. Ripley or Ballerina. 

I read A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane, the semi-autobiographical novel of a teenage boy who explores a possible vocation as a priest before abandoning it to become a writer. And through this narrative I encountered a second book—the book that inspires the protagonist of Murnane’s story—called The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton, the memoir of a man who abandons a life of restless drifting to become a Trappist monk as well as, again, a writer. 

These seemed fruitful places for my own inquiry. Both men had become writers, which was ultimately my aspiration. And the arc of the life journey of each man was already well established. Merton lived from 1915 to 1968, and Murnane is living still. He is well over over eighty years of age. Each book was authored by a man who already knew who he was and also knew how he had become that person. Or at least that’s the narrative I thought I would find.

I started to develop a theory about how to become somebody. Perhaps, I thought, the difference between an actual somebody and a person merely striving to be somebody is their ability to suspend disbelief in themselves. The conventional expression of this notion is to “believe in yourself.” But this formulation hides the almost supernatural mindset required for becoming somebody. You will need to suspend any potential disbelief that the story in your head—the story about your amazing future—isn’t real. You will be able to believe powerfully enough in your dreams and aspirations to see them as solid as any tangible object. 

For several months, I clung on to this theory about how to become somebody. I struggled along with my project, inching forward very slowly through Merton’s autobiography, while making faster progress with Murnane’s fictionalized memoir. Merton’s story made me uneasy. I didn’t feel he was being completely honest with me. When Merton was six years old, his mother died, and just ten years later, his father died. These deaths are, in my opinion, among the most striking facts about Merton, and yet he has surprisingly little to say about reaching adulthood having lost both of his parents. This elusiveness would be just about tolerable were it not also characteristic of his writing about his journey toward Catholicism.

About a year after his father’s death, Merton takes a break from his studies (in England) to go on vacation to France and then Italy. In Rome, he experiences one of his first great spiritual awakenings:

“It was in Rome that my conception of Christ was formed. It was there I first saw Him, Whom I now serve as my God and my King, and Who owns and rules my life… I was in my room. It was night. The light was on. Suddenly it seemed to me that Father, who had now been dead more than a year, was there with me. The sense of his presence was as vivid and as real and as startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me. The whole thing passed in a flash, but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhelmed with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul, and I was pierced deeply with a light that made me realize something of the condition I was in, and I was filled with horror at what I saw...”

But shortly after this, Merton goes to New York City, one of the many hubs of his very worldly family, and… nothing! The religious awakening comes to naught. And I would not have been deeply troubled by this either if Merton had cast a light on what was going on in his heart, but this is something he outright refuses to do.

“There is no point in telling all the details of how this real but temporary religious fervor of mine cooled down and disappeared.”

There is something slippery about Merton’s writing. His memoir frequently arrives at turning points, only to wriggle away again without giving the reader anything memorable to hold on to. The writer’s pact with the reader is contigent on the reader believing in the fullness and veracity of the words. This is not something Merton can do convincingly.

Murnane is far more honest. In A Season on Earth, Murnane’s alter ego, Adrian Sherd, lives on the periphery of the city of Melbourne. All his friends and family are Catholic. He spends a lot of time yearning to be somewhere more exciting, around more interesting people. In his imagination, the United States of America is the source of everything immoral, sensual and subversive. Local Catholics are fighting against the encroachment of that immoral world, as well as remaining vigilant against the other great amoral threat they see in the world—Communism.

Sin is everywhere. Adrian is distracted by desire. It’s cringe-inducing to bear witness to the number of times he indulges in his solitary vice. (Here is the kind of sentence one ends up reading in various forms repeatedly: “He became a slave of lust and couldn't sleep at night until he had seduced some film star.”) Almost anything can set Adrian off. At times, I wanted Murnane to stop writing about this. The book is very long. Adrian’s behavior follows a pattern that becomes repetitive and predictable—and exasperating. He finds new ways to indulge his lust (always in a solitary fashion), and then he becomes overwhelmed with guilt, finds a way to live in a sin-free way for a number of weeks or months, and then he relapses.

About a third of the way through the book, Adrian decides that the potential solution to his sinful state is to dedicate himself fully to Catholicism. He decides to embark on a journey toward the priesthood. At the junior seminary of the Charleroi Fathers he is well away from his family and from the temptations of the city. "He smiled at the trees and flowerbeds and parted his lips as though he saw all nature as a visible manifestation of God—and hoped one of the priests was watching him from a window."

The book continues to situate the reader so close to the mind of the main character that it remains cringe inducing. It’s evident that Adrian’s turn toward religion is not entirely genuine. He is only looking for inner peace, for a reprieve from his tormented thoughts and imagination. Yet even in the seminary, he cannot find what he is looking for. One day, the Charleroi Fathers take Adrian and the other young seminarians for a trip to the beach, and Adrian accidentally brushes against a bikini-clad woman, and his lust is subsequently stirred again.

“When he lifted his right leg he saw a thin coating of sand grains on a part of his shin. He stopped and stared. Underneath these grains was a smear of oil from the calf of the leg of the golden-skinned woman in her twenties. She had rubbed the oil on with her fingers. The same fingers had rubbed other parts of her body. Wherever her suntan extended, the fingers had been—spreading the gentle oil with delicate strokes.”

Shortly after this encounter, Adrian leaves the Charleroi Fathers. He decides on a new vocation. “Looking at landscapes and observing their effect on his emotions was what he really wanted for his life's work." Having read several of Murnane’s books, including The Plains, I saw in this sentence an indication of the turning point that proved decisive. While the second half of A Season on Earth is only slightly less cringe-inducing and tumultuous than the first half, as Adrian finds one literary hero after another to emulate, the vocation described in that sentence is the one that, as far as I can tell, the author faithfully followed. I had finally found an account of how to be somebody, and it was credible, convincing, and didn’t sidestep any of the embarrassing, cringe-inducing parts.

Yet Adrian’s new vocation does not free him from torment. Now, in addition to being a perpetually sexually frustrated young man, he yearns for unattainable landscapes. He does not believe Australia offers appropriate landscapes for a writer.

Where he truly longs to be is England. He becomes temporarily obsessed with the poet AE Housman. He believes Housman to be a real somebody, a person to emulate. One of Housman’s best-known poems is “Bredon Hill.”

“In summertime on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.”

Adrian wants to be as close to Housman’s spiritual landscape as possible. One day, Adrian cycles out of Melbourne to the village of Stepney. His plan is to wander around in the deserted countryside and do his utmost to imagine himself on Bredon Hill. He closes his eyes and listens to the wind. “He had never seen an English landscape so clearly or felt so close to the countryside that was now his spiritual home. He was within sight of Bredon Hill when he lost his footing and fell.”

This section, appearing without warning in A Season on Earth, rather floored me. Because I, as a boy, grew up within easy walking distance of Bredon Hill. When I waited in front of our house for a neighbour to pick me up and take me and her own kids to school, I would gaze at Bredon Hill, which changed costumes according to the seasons. It was always there, marking one of the local boundaries of our fertile vale. I had had access to a place that one of the wisest and most gifted Anglophone writers, living on the opposite side of the earth, had yearned desperately to visit. So badly did he want to be there that, in closing his eyes and willing himself to be there, he had fallen into a ditch in rural Australia.

And then, a few months later, as I was still digesting the book, another weird parallel between our otherwise very different lives seemed to surface. I became almost convinced that the tram that travels over Edmonton’s High-Level Bridge is one of the same trams that Adrian/Murnane used to travel on as a schoolboy. I do not mean just the same type of tram, but quite possibly one of the exact same trams. The historical timeline makes it a perfect fit.

“At least 765 W-class trams were built in Melbourne from 1923 until 1956. These icons of Australian transit were designated as heritage items by the National Trust in 1990. Melbourne 930 was withdrawn from service in 1997 and placed in reserve storage. In 2004, the car was shipped to Edmonton as an ambassador for the City of Melbourne and the State of Victoria. Following extensive truck and brake overhauls, car 930 entered service in 2006.” (Edmonton Radial Railway Society)

Before thinking seriously about the life of Gerald Murnane, I had considered many of the facts of my own life as barriers that had to be overcome. In the soulless Edmonton parking lot outside the clinic, the very city itself had seemed like a barrier. For decades I had thought of Edmonton as not enough. How much more productive it would be, I thought, to be a big city writer—to be cosmopolitan and well-traveled, like Hari Kunzru, or any number of other contemporary authors that I admired. Yet Murnane planted a very different idea in my mind. There was a different trajectory my life could follow.

“I have never travelled more than a day's journey by road or rail from my birthplace,” writes Murnane in Border Districts. Murnane has always been intentionally un-cosmopolitan. As a young man, he stayed rooted in place against his will and yearned for Bredon Hill. He stayed rooted in one place, and then another place not far away, and paid very close attention to those places. At some point, he became a mature man. He realized the inspiration he needed was the ground right under his feet.

I started to suffer from a new anxiety. I had travelled too much! My life had already been too eventful! I hadn’t paid close enough attention to everything that had happened! This new anxiety, I realized, was, yet again, the anxiety of a growing awareness of the depleting supply of time remaining to me. It was the same anxiety that had crept over me when reading Kunzru’s opening description of middle age in Red Pill. 

Murnane again provided the antidote. In Velvet Waters, he writes: “In all the world there has never been, there is not, and there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.”

I no longer felt the urgency of being somebody. I would always be wandering from place to place, always striving to become somebody, always incomplete, until such a time as I surrendered my willful self entirely.

NOTES

A few days ago, I briefly mentioned a wildfire in a national park 375 kms from where I live. That wildfire subsequently destroyed parts of the town of Jasper. Such terrible news. If you want to read more about beautiful Jasper, and what it was like to grow up there, read Thomas Wharton.

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The Substack Octopus will take a summer vacation, returning in mid to late August.

Books

Red Pill, Hari Kunzru. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2020

The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton. Harcourt, Inc. 1948

A Season on Earth, Gerald Murnane. text publishing, 2019.

[Note from the publisher: “A Season on Earth is Murnane’s second novel as it was intended to be, bringing together all of its four sections—the first two of which were published as A Lifetime on Clouds in 1976 and the last two of which have never been in print.”]

Other sources

Edmonton Street Car Fleet

https://www.edmontonstreetcars.ca/streetcars/melbourne930

Photos

Tracy Chapman

https://www.about-tracy-chapman.net/cat/photo/

Thomas Merton

https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/blog/the-wild-young-man-who-became-a-mystic-and-prophet

Tram (streetcar)

https://www.railpictures.ca/upload/operated-by-the-edmonton-radil-railway-society-melbourne-and-metropolitan-tramways-board-1947-built-w6-class-tram-no-930-runs-across-the-high-level-bridge-on-the-former-cp-rail-line-from-old-strath