The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

I remember  a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness.  This is how it will be when I grow up.  I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her.  I shall live as people in novels live and have lived.  Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance.  However... who said that thing about 'the littleness of life that art exaggerates'?  There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out.  I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about.  Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.

I suppose I wanted to do something normal, or at least pretend that something was normal even if it wasn't. When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books.  You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality.  Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become.  You want them to tell you that things are OK.   And is there anything wrong with that?

"I'm still bald," I said.

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully?  Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him?  Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised?  Who avoided being hurt and called it capacity for survival?  Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels?  One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain?  Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt - and inflicted for precisely that reason.