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May. 15th, 2023 11:59 amGaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
Reread (Listen to the audio, actually) for two reasons:
One, as a retreat to a familiar favorite Oxford novel after reading Babel and The Royal We, but honestly I don't have much to say about that. I don't have very strong feelings about Oxford or the Oxford novel.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
naraht had an interesting comment on some of the Oxford inaccuracies in Babel.
The second reason is that my 20th high school reunion is happening in a month and I am having feelings about that. I haven't gone to any previous reunions; My tenth was scheduled, like Prom and many other important social events when I actually was in high school, on a Friday evening. Don't worry, I'm not still spiteful about that. :P But they scheduled our 20th for a Saturday night so I can actually attend. There's a lot of reunion literature about returning and wanting to project a certain image of yourself to your old classmates, but that's not really a concern of mine. I was a weird eighteen year old nerd in high school, and I am now a weird thirty eight year old nerd, and in twenty years I expect I will be a weird fifty eight year old nerd. I was never afraid to be at least a significant fraction of myself in front of my high school classmates, no matter how little they liked me as a result.
But that's why I think I find Gaudy Night such an interesting touchstone for reflection. Harriet is certainly concerned about reputational issues, but more than anything her reunion gaudy is an opportunity to ask herself "Is the self I am now consistent with the vision I had for my future when I was a student, and if it is not, am I okay with that?" She looks at her former classmates with a concern not to how they judge her, (moreso, an exhaustion about how they judge her) but with a concern to how they all represent different paths she could have gone down from the same starting point. And I have to admit I am very curious along the same lines to see how the many classmates I have lost touch with have fared. There's only a very small handful that I have been in contact with, and even that has been sporadic and/or Facebook-mediated. I left high school behind, with gratitude for the good parts and with a clear sense that I was leaving something behind that had limited me. So it feels a little paradoxical: On the one I hand I feel genuinely excited to see some of my classmates again, on the other hand it feels somewhat selfish and petty to want to see them again given that I don't anticipate any rekindling of friendships, just the satisfaction of curiosity. I suppose there are worse reasons to go to a reunion.
One early datapoint of where people have ended up: A few weeks ago, the reunion committee passed out a list of my classmates who have passed away in the last twenty years, asking if anyone knew anyone else who should be added to the memorial list. I hadn't heard about any of the deaths, and I spent a couple of days googling obituaries and just feeling aimlessly sad about people I'd known as early as elementary school, but who admittedly I'd always known I would lose touch with as soon as we left school.
The central tension in Harriet's reflections on her Oxford experience and its aftermath is on whether women can have both personal and professional success, or if they have to sacrifice one for the other. There is a sense that this question is particularly fraught for women because they are judged suspiciously even if they do manage professional success. But I resonate with the question anyway. Does a successful life require success in both, or success in the right one, or what? If I had made different choices about balancing the two spheres, would I be happier and more successful now?
It'll be interesting to see how I feel coming out of the reunion.
Reread (Listen to the audio, actually) for two reasons:
One, as a retreat to a familiar favorite Oxford novel after reading Babel and The Royal We, but honestly I don't have much to say about that. I don't have very strong feelings about Oxford or the Oxford novel.
naraht had an interesting comment on some of the Oxford inaccuracies in Babel.The second reason is that my 20th high school reunion is happening in a month and I am having feelings about that. I haven't gone to any previous reunions; My tenth was scheduled, like Prom and many other important social events when I actually was in high school, on a Friday evening. Don't worry, I'm not still spiteful about that. :P But they scheduled our 20th for a Saturday night so I can actually attend. There's a lot of reunion literature about returning and wanting to project a certain image of yourself to your old classmates, but that's not really a concern of mine. I was a weird eighteen year old nerd in high school, and I am now a weird thirty eight year old nerd, and in twenty years I expect I will be a weird fifty eight year old nerd. I was never afraid to be at least a significant fraction of myself in front of my high school classmates, no matter how little they liked me as a result.
But that's why I think I find Gaudy Night such an interesting touchstone for reflection. Harriet is certainly concerned about reputational issues, but more than anything her reunion gaudy is an opportunity to ask herself "Is the self I am now consistent with the vision I had for my future when I was a student, and if it is not, am I okay with that?" She looks at her former classmates with a concern not to how they judge her, (moreso, an exhaustion about how they judge her) but with a concern to how they all represent different paths she could have gone down from the same starting point. And I have to admit I am very curious along the same lines to see how the many classmates I have lost touch with have fared. There's only a very small handful that I have been in contact with, and even that has been sporadic and/or Facebook-mediated. I left high school behind, with gratitude for the good parts and with a clear sense that I was leaving something behind that had limited me. So it feels a little paradoxical: On the one I hand I feel genuinely excited to see some of my classmates again, on the other hand it feels somewhat selfish and petty to want to see them again given that I don't anticipate any rekindling of friendships, just the satisfaction of curiosity. I suppose there are worse reasons to go to a reunion.
One early datapoint of where people have ended up: A few weeks ago, the reunion committee passed out a list of my classmates who have passed away in the last twenty years, asking if anyone knew anyone else who should be added to the memorial list. I hadn't heard about any of the deaths, and I spent a couple of days googling obituaries and just feeling aimlessly sad about people I'd known as early as elementary school, but who admittedly I'd always known I would lose touch with as soon as we left school.
The central tension in Harriet's reflections on her Oxford experience and its aftermath is on whether women can have both personal and professional success, or if they have to sacrifice one for the other. There is a sense that this question is particularly fraught for women because they are judged suspiciously even if they do manage professional success. But I resonate with the question anyway. Does a successful life require success in both, or success in the right one, or what? If I had made different choices about balancing the two spheres, would I be happier and more successful now?
It'll be interesting to see how I feel coming out of the reunion.