I’ve been reading Adam Phillips’ book On Balance.  I started reading near the end, which I almost never do, because near the end happened to be the chapter on fairy tales. Reading that chapter was like eating bacon. All the ideas were distinct and tasty and salty and kind of obvious, in the way that sometimes complicated ideas expressed very, very clearly can seem obvious. But that was last night. Today the bacon has turned back into the pig. A greased pig, no less, at the county fair. Ha! Pig revenge. I can’t keep hold of any of it.

Instead I keep thinking about the very last section of the book, after the fairy tale chapter, titled “Forsaken Favourites.” It’s about falling out of love with writing you loved when you were younger, and how when you go back and read the thing you loved and realize it isn’t all that good, that you are too good for it, there follows this awful feeling of having been had. You feel defensive of your poor, passionate young self who didn’t know any better. For Phillips, the great betrayer is Dylan Thomas.

“It is as though, in retrospect, I would like to have been more foolproof, a terrible thing to want. Clearly, we can never trust ourselves, we can only risk ourselves. Our disillusionments must be the key to our tastes. The mystery is why such vehement unmaskings are required. Why we can’t just move on. Hopefully, what we learn from our mistakes is that we shall go on making them.”

And then I turned the page, anxious to know why I can’t recover from the embarrassment of making my mom listen while I read Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” aloud five times in a row in our hotel room in Dublin in 1992.

But that was it! That was the last line of the book! There were a few pages of acknowledgments and what-not at the very end, so you couldn’t tell, page-wise, that that was going to be the last line. And then I thought, he did that on purpose! He wanted the reader to end on a mistake, and then go on.

That’s okay with me. I like that sort of thing. I also like to have someone smart endorse my mistakes, or at least my mistake-making. The experience he describes, though, the falling out of love, the discovery that “virtually everything I valued [about Thomas] as an adolescent . . . annoys or bores me now,” — to me this isn’t just one of the many adult corrections to teen fixations. To me this happens all the time, every day, about all sorts of things. One moment I’ll take pleasure in something and the very next moment I’ll be disappointed by it. It’s like a hyper-compressed form of maturation. Sometimes, like when I’m watching Glee, I’m pleased and disappointed at the exact same time.

I don’t think this is about my adult self schooling my inner tween/teen/twenty-something, and I don’t think it’s about guilty pleasures. I think it’s about death. It’s about the thing you love changing before your very eyes. So when I watch Glee, my pleasure/disappointment is two-fold:

1) I know I’m enjoying something more than the thing actually merits, which is to say, my enjoyment is partial, but I’m willing myself not to be critical in order to enjoy more fully, which is sour-sweet, and 2) the thing I am sourly-sweetly enjoying is hurtling toward the end of its forty-fifth minute. The thing I love is running out.

When I look at the cats sleeping in their bunk beds (one draped over the back of the armchair, one on the seat) I feel pleasure. They look cute, etc. But then I lean in to scratch Big Orange under the chin, and he meows, or yawns, and I smell his breath like unto a thousand graves, and my pleasure disappears. I know his teeth are bad, and that he’s getting old, and that he’ll die, and then I start to notice all the other fragile unkempt uncute things about him.

But it’s not the cat’s (and by extension my own) mortality that ruins my pleasure. It’s my impatience. I disturbed the scene. In my hurry to connect, to have him respond to me, to be even more cute, to be more so I could have more, I transformed peace into worry. It’s like I can’t stand for something just to sit. I can’t bear to wait, even when the thing I’m waiting for I want never to come. I am running out the thing I love!

Which, ok, returns us to mortality. Phillips says that sometimes we find a person so appalling the only thing we know how to do is fall in love with them. Later we fall out of love with them because, hey! They’re appalling! You can float the comforting illusion that the person changed, you both changed, etc., when really you only returned, bravely or wearily, to the original truth. But when it is a book you stop loving, there can be no question about what changed. Only you have changed.  The book is a mirror, but also a monument. It sits there, year after year, and you return to it and say, what was I? Who was I, to have loved you? Still, the book endures, and even with the end of your attachment, even with that crummy sense of having been taken in by someone you trusted, the book’s very durability becomes a reflection of your own durability, and not just your durability, but your progress, your refinement, your excellent, excellent taste.

But the old cat, the old cat you loved as a kitten, and in his fat middle-age, and now in his dotage, the cat who showed you how constant you were, how steady your love, how immune to his increasing demands and bad temper — when he dies, when he runs out, then the younger self, the self of passionate, misguided, appalling and appalled love, who had bad taste, who risked her heart, is embraced, without the slightest disillusionment, by the current self, who, with the very same heart, loves so wisely and so well.