III.xiv. Turning Twenty on a Busy Day

"Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story—
The days of our youth are the days of our glory;"
- Lord Byron (Stanzas Written on the Road Between Pisa and Florence)

My twentieth birthday was something I had wished to ponder at much greater length than was ever actually possible. I suppose I take time to reflect upon things more than many people do, and since as far back as I can remember I have daydreamed constantly, perhaps at the expense of my slumbering dreams, which at best are fleeting and at worst non-existent. I daydream about ridiculous things; about building cathedrals, being the king of France, finding lost masterpieces. These intimations sometimes seem so vivid that they are scarcely less believable than my waking life. I don't really suppose that this habit is a manifestation of delusions of grandeur, but rather a tenacious imaginative inheritance from my youth, and a certain constant feeling that the present century is not quite the one I was intended for. "I must have been a painter in another life," I once told my brother while we were examining a frescoed room. Sometimes I feel as though if this world were to end I would wake up on the heights of an enormous scaffolding, with some beautiful familiar figure calling up to me that it was time for me to take my lunch.
    But will all these pillars of my imagined world somehow vanish in my twenty-first year? Do they belong to an earlier version of myself? These days I am preoccupied with the kind of self-examining questions one is always at pains to answer. The root of the problem is that I couldn't really have asked for more in my life thus far, especially of late, and I mean that in all seriousness. Fortune, in my youth, has been as good to me as I could ask. It has constructed a world for me that is happy beyond belief. My parents raised me in a way that, I am only realizing now, I could never enough thank them for. My friends are beyond any sort of reproach. I have never really lacked anything I needed. Growing up was a blessing; this year was to be my apotheosis. Yet Martin Amis wrote that turning twenty was "in all consciousness, the end of youth." I'm not sure if I'm prepared to accept that simple an explanation, either simply through denial or because to me age is something infinitely more complicated. I never really felt like a teenager, though I experienced my adolescence in a uniquely Petrarchian sort of way, with its share of happy longing and hilarious self-inflicted tragedy. I became what I am now at about fifteen or sixteen, not overnight but not all that gradually either, and since then I have felt like a fixed entity. I've had the benefit of knowing myself from an early age, knowing what I wanted to study, roughly where I wanted to go in life. Those close to me know that I am quite certain in my aspirations and beliefs, without the overbearing need to pronounce their validity.
    I don't quite know what lessons I should draw from all this. Sometimes I feel a Christian sort of guilt for not doing more to spread my fortune to others. Equally, I think all too often about those fascinating medieval depictions of fortune's wheel, turning unpredictably to unseat those who climb it. Yet to think about this wheel too much is fall victim of it. To not live for today is to put stock in the future, and putting stock in the future is nothing more than gambling. To me, the outside world, the one on television, in science, in politics, has long ceased making any sense. My world, that which I treasure, is my rock, and it keeps me steady.
    And so, in what is without a doubt my most extraordinary year to date (no more of this feeling of déja vu every New Year's), I turned twenty on a rainy day in Bologna. I didn't see anyone that day, save my brother, who is all the good companion a brother should be, and none of the bad. We ate lunch at the Al-Salaam cafeteria just down the street, with its windows decked with posters mourning the death of Arafat. The Middle Eastern food we ate reminded me of Toronto and all its requisite multicultural variety. I had class for the rest of the day, though in the evening Alex and I had a quick dinner at a nearby Pizzeria before seeing Beethoven's Leonore performed at the Teatro Communale. The girl selling the tickets had warned us that they were "really more like listening seats," and she wasn't joking. Partial view would have been front row centre to the nosebleed section that was the second balconetta; not that the stage antics, generously called acting, were very important to this opera. Nonetheless, the music was beautiful, and it rounded off the busy day, and the preceding two decades, rather nicely.
    I entered the third happier than I had ever been.