Vertigo

"He died at the height of his powers."

I was leafing through a new first edition of Camus's L'homme révolté I picked up over the weekend (Clare chewed up the spine of my previous first ed…) and found a clipped NY Times obituary of Camus hiding in the pages. At the time of his death in a car accident in 1960, he'd won the Nobel Prize a few years earlier (the youngest ever to win it) and was generally considered the heir of Thomas Mann to the title of Europe's greatest living writer.

He died at the height of his powers.

How do we know he wasn't about to level up? Is it just a polite way of showing respect? A way of saying he hadn't yet hit that near-inevitable wall, after which his work began to suffer from inconsistency or judgment? What would it look like if we could tap out before our reputations began to suffer, before we began giving our family and loved ones reason to remember a diminished version of ourselves?

And what if, despite our own ego, our friends and family like us better when we begin to soften? I'd imagine it's pretty common that we are a lot to deal with at the height of our powers. But there is something compelling – seductive – about "he died at the height of his powers" being the headline of your obituary, isn't there?

When I was younger, the age of 25 loomed large in my consciousness. Nearly all of my favorite writers published their first novels when they were 25: Mann, Dostoevsky, Camus, Pynchon, etc.

I earned my MA at 23 and set about pretending to write for the next year and a half. I did write, but it was the tedious writing that happens when you're writing with legacy in mind – divorced from the thing itself, like you're hovering outside the event, hoping it lives up to your fantasies. I wasn't doing the hard work of writing words and sentences, stringing them together not for posterity, but just to make sense of something. To learn what and how the thing was going to happen.

I turned 26 with a heavy heart. I had not joined the club. (But I had gone to law school! Running from a calling is strong in this one.)

When I go read those first, early works of great writers now, they read like the work of precocious youth: heady, but skinny, lacking the emotional heft of later, more mature works. They reek of promise but do not make a hearty meal.

Camus died at 46. At the height of his powers. I am now 43. I comfort and challenge myself with this thought: let's get this damned book out with the benefit of a life lived fully, closer to the supposed height of my powers.

L'etranger is a good book, but has nothing on La chute. The same is true for Budenbrooks v The Magic Mountain, V. v Gravity's Rainbow (although that is a closer call), or Poor Folk v any of Dostoevsky's post-Siberia novels.

It isn't a failure to miss someone else's timeline, and holding yourself to a timeline already missed is another form of hiding. "Well, if I haven't done it by now..."

Obviously, I am speaking about a specific thing I am processing, but it isn't hard to widen the aperture to see this phenomenon writ large.

• If I don't make partner by 35, I'll never amount to anything.
• If I'm not married and have a child by 30, life will have passed me by.
• If my business doesn't go seven-figures within 18 months, I'll be a failure.

This is the thinking of a child who doesn't have the experience, yet, to understand the task. It's easy to see this clearly when we look at others' lives, but damn it, we refuse to extend ourselves the same grace. I'm using "we" liberally here; permit me to make this claim only for myself and let you decide whether to ascribe it to yourself –

Even now, having been through the kind of living that lays quite bare the facile notions behind this thinking, I hold myself to those standards. There is still a part of me that cannot let go of this "failure."

He died at the height of his powers.

The logic of the statement insists: he still had more to give, perhaps his greatest work. It died with him and neither he nor we will ever have it. Would we have preferred to have what was still in the tank more than the early work? I would sacrifice Buddenbrooks to get Doctor Faustus 100 of 100 times.

And so what, really, is going on with this notion that we've failed? It lets us off the hook. At 43, I've lived enough to have some actual fucking tales to tell, some sense of the stakes. Experienced the lived terror of impending nothingness.

A few weeks ago, I received a message from someone who took exception to me calling myself a writer. "You haven't published a damned thing, and no wonder: you have a self-aware flourish that is unbecoming."

Son.

A writer is someone who writes. And I have experienced nothing harder than giving birth to a novel. I include having a major organ cut out of my body and someone else's stitched back in. Then learning to walk again. And learning to work through more physical pain than most people will ever experience once in their life. Writing is something I do because I cannot not write. I am not whole without it – and I've spent long enough being a missing piece. (Hat tip if you get that reference.)

For the first time in my life, I feel equal to the task. The mission still scares the shit out of me. But if experience is how we charge the battery of our powers, how we learn the things that are meaningful and ludicrous and devastating, then this is just part of the process. Maybe I'm a slow learner. Perhaps I'm lucky that I didn't meet the deadline.

I've learned what extending myself grace looks like: it's accepting that it takes some time to build yourself to the height of your powers and do the damned thing. Then you get stronger and do it again. And again. Wrest out every last drop.

Louis Colombo reminded me of a wonderful line from Nietzsche, which is one to hold close: "Some men are born posthumously."

Writers live odd, bifurcated lives. Both imminent and immanent. I'm (finally) doing my Work and I am aiming not to die at the height of my powers.

I aim to drain myself to empty.