When We Were One-and-Twenty

When I talked to my eighteen-year-old brother the morning after Election Day, he was despondent.

“You know I’m going to be drafted now. We’re going to need more troops. No one’s going to join the army willingly anymore—no one’s going to be like, ‘Oh, well, I’m not going to college, so the army would be a good option.’ And the National Guard is all, like, 45-year-old guys in Dad’s shape. They’re going to run out of people to send, and I’m going to be drafted.”

In a paranoid way, this made a lot of sense. I searched for words both comforting and true. Then my brother added: “And I’d be such a bad soldier.” Not only was this last admission dead-on—my brother is a wuss on an epic scale—but it also revealed an unusual level of self-awareness. It pained me.

“Well,” I said at last, “maybe you could marry a foreign national and get citizenship somewhere else.” Which is how my brother decided that he’ll take Swedish next semester: “Swedish girls are hot.”

I was relieved that our conversation had retreated from the precipice of candor and had returned to its wanted level of discourse, wherein my brother is a jerk and I reproach him for his jerkiness.

“You asshole,” I said, happy to once again know what to say.

Too many conversations were on uncertain ground that Wednesday after the election. We woke up tired and forlorn and grew more so as the day progressed, seeing the grief in each other’s faces and in Kerry’s face when he finally conceded. In too many conversations, I could feel cracks forming, could feel candor welling forth, unbidden and unwanted. My roommate cried in dining hall, painful tears that she wiped away, hard, with her fingertips, and I could do nothing but rub her back and look grave.

I called my parents early that Wednesday morning and told them I wanted to die. My father was matter-of-fact: “I was your age when McGovern lost so badly.” He said: “It’s good to have your heart broken early.”

But I hadn’t known my heart could be broken by a presidential election. Hadn’t I—hadn’t we—cultivated our world-weariness until it became not just a facade, but an armor? Didn’t we look really good, really convincingly jaded, dressed in vintage clothing, eyebrow arched, drinking our coffee black? Hadn’t we founded a half-assed arts collective in our common room? Didn’t we know kind of a lot of punk songs? Couldn’t we quote Sylvia Plath to each other in flat voices—“Every woman adores a Fascist/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you”? Didn’t we construe practically everything ironically? Weren’t we post-angst, post-emotion?

Then why did this election hurt so much?

Because I have often found more comfort in words than in people, I turned to my Norton Anthology of English Literature on that black day after the election. I was looking for something visceral, for a howling dark poem, but instead I found “When I Was One-and-Twenty,” by A. E. Housman: “When I was one-and-twenty/ I heard a wise man say,/ ‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas/ But not your heart away… But I was one-and-twenty/ No use to talk to me.” Then there is a stanza break, and: “‘The heart out of the bosom/ Was never given in vain;/ ’Tis paid with sighs a plenty/ And sold for endless rue.’/ And I am two-and-twenty,/ And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.” It was all there, our overwrought, blinding grief, our callowness, our heartbreak that was no less real for all of that.

And there is some small virtue in knowing that we have hearts to sell for endless rue. It is a painful lesson, but perhaps one we needed to learn, that we are not so jaded as we would fancy ourselves. We may be advocates of ironic detachment, but we are not entirely detached. In the hopeful, terrifying months leading up to this election, we canvassed, we telephoned voters in swing states, we taped signs up in our bedroom windows. We watched the debates. We wore pins. We argued about political issues with unselfconscious earnestness. But our greatest leap of faith was giving our hearts away to John Kerry with the ardor that remains, even in this irony-steeped era, both the gift and the burden of youth.

Phoebe Kosman ‘05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Monday.