Of Hyde Park, Gore Vidal, the Continuity of Inner Narratives, and the True Because

Over the weekend, I hiked from Springwood (FDR-World) to the Vanderbilt mansion, a seven-mile walk, which took me past a hidden cove on a remote part of the Hudson River, where I thought a lot about the relationship between what’s real and what’s not real.

Hyde Park, for example, is not a real village.

It was the strip of the Albany Post Road where the various taverns etc. that catered to the “downstairs” elements of the many stately mansions hereabouts opened for business.

As such, unlike nearby Poughkeepsie and Rhinebeck, Hyde Park doesn’t have what you might call a historic downtown, although it does have a post office – interior walls covered with hearty WPA-inspired murals of pioneers fishing, trapping, and lumbering – and it did have a train station.

Impecunious descendents of those early merchants and bankers started deeding the stately mansions over to the New York Parks Department 75 years or so ago, so a few of them still stand.



(Many more of them are in ruins, and, of course, those are the ones I’m actually interested in exploring. But they’re hard to track down. One of the few I did manage to stumble across is Wyndcliffe, a derelict mansion just outside Rhinecliffe, the strange little derelict river crossing just outside Rhinebeck. )

Came home and watched The United States of Amnesia, which is a documentary about Gore Vidal’s last days. A really, really depressing documentary about Gore Vidal’s last days.

Gore Vidal was one of my great intellectual crushes. Never cared much for his fiction, but his essays were – are – superb. Mark Conly gifted me with a copy of United States: Essays 1952–1992, which I read cover to cover and dragged around with me for years till I finally gave it away to Ranier, a college student who clerked at The Little Store.

(Perilous business, giving people books. Most of the time, they don’t read them, and so, I half expected to find United States: Essays 1952–1992 crammed into a Cannery Row garbage bin, kind of like the plantings in Steinbeck’s short story The Chrysanthemums. I didn’t. But then, Ranier was kind of an odd duck.)

Anyway, Gore Vidal did not come to a happy end. He spent the last decade or so of his life as a querulous, incontinent old fart, living on memories. Intellectually sharp to the end, sadly, but that was a curse. He was one of the few intellectuals, for example, who spoke his thoughts out loud that the U.S. should share part of the blame for the 9/11 attacks – a very unpopular stance, as you may imagine.

Alas! Voicing such controversial sentiments did not make Gore Vidal any more relevant in his miserable old age.

One scene in the documentary stuck with me particularly – Gore Vidal in his wheelchair, looking particularly scrupulous and miserly, while an old friend – presumably from his Exeter schoolboy days – trotted behind him.

They were both in their 80s. But the friend looked vigorous, while Gore Vidal looked like Dorian Grey’s portrait.

And I thought, Wow! Okay! If you ever need convincing about why you must drag yourself to the gym three times a week and walk at least 25 miles a week, here it is! Because if you don’t, you’re gonna end up spending that last decade – and girlfriend, it is looming – being physically helpless and perfectly miserable!!!!

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Getting old is such a weird experience! I don’t know whether the inner narrative me still relates to myself at the age of 18, but I can certainly relate to myself at the age of 30 – when I looked enough like myself at age 18 for some narrative continuity.

At what point do people just start looking just generically old?

One of the games I used to play in crowds – and don’t anymore because it’s just too-oo painful – is to try and imagine what the people around me looked like as children.

Somewhere around the age of 40, people's features seem to lose any similarity to their childhood and adolescent selves. It’s a progression peculiar to humans, I think. You don’t find it in other animals.

This is me at the age of seven or so:



This is me at the age of 17:



Here I am again at 34:



And here I am today:



Is there any continuity? I don’t see it. And that's painful. Very painful. Not because of vanity. Although I can't articulate the nature of the true "because."