All at once

This week I read Ben Lerner’s new book Transcription, a fictional dive into the early days of the pandemic, technology, and the effect of both on memory and experience. One particular sentence (actually, just a part of a sentence) late in the book really hit for me: "I felt eight and eighteen and forty-five all at once..." It evokes that feeling that you are well beyond your youth, but so much of that “you” from early adulthood filled with bold confidence is still within reach, at some level, inside of you. And at the same time, you’re still feeling remnants of the unsure child who feels like he should know more than he does, who feels like he’s the only one that doesn’t have things figured out (except now he knows that being an adult doesn’t necessarily help you figure things out). If that, there, doesn’t sum up what life as an adult feels like, I’m not sure what does. I wonder if that feeling persists later in life. When you’re 70 or 80, does your 50 year-old self linger in the…