With an ironic and incisive narrative, in “One day this pain will be useful to you” (Adelphi, 2010), Peter Cameron guides readers through the events of a eighteen years old to discover himself, in a world that only allows certain things, all of them and immediately.
Family and social dogmas
James Sveck he is the eighteen year old misfit and lonely who doesn’t want to know about university and parties with his peers. The mother Marjoriean art gallery owner and divorce collector, cannot accept that her son aspires to live in a house in the Midwest rather than attend college.
The father Paula lawyer obsessed with his dark circles, finds himself reluctantly realizing that James, instead of living like an ordinary boy of his age, prefers to spend his days with his grandmother Nanette o in loneliness.
His sister Gilliana college student infatuated with her linguistics professor, thinks she knows her brother. She, like the other reference figures in James’ life, believes in the granite dogma social: the University it is a duty and a incontrovertible good which the boy cannot do without.
For the young man’s family it almost seems that university e happiness are necessarily superimposable, or at least, always related to each other in a close cause-effect relationship. And in the end, why shouldn’t it be like this? In a world where everything runs, rushes, conforms, it is possible, as James would like so much, to be happy with littleA book by Trollope, a chat with Nanette, a house in the Midwest, and yes, maybe even a steady job at McDonald’s to support themselves financially.
In the end, it would be, if nothing more was really asked for. As it is it would scandalize our society and how the James family would be horrified at the mere idea that anyone could to be satisfied so little?
Individual and society
James finds himself growing up in a world that has already imposed on him the model to pursue: the embodiment of the perfect borghese that each of his parents should represent. However, the latter only have the facade image modeled by their work successes. The label with which they sell themselves to society and with which they omit their relationship failures.
James is framed by others as thenonconformist: the fragile young man, highly sensitive and intelligent, but incapable of relating to others.
For me it’s the opposite: thoughts are truer when they are thought, expressing them distorts and dilutes them, the best thing is that they remain in the dark hangar of the mind, in its controlled climate, so that the air and light can alter them like an accidentally exposed film.
Peter Cameron, One day this pain will be useful to you.
However, we are sure that the seme of his discomfort lies precisely in his idiosyncrasy towards his peers? Or, simply, the neurosis Is it the product of a conflict between external reality and its internal universe? Psychoanalysts Miguel Benasayag and Gérard Schmit, in their essay The Age of Sad Passionshighlight that, within psychoanalysis and psychiatry, labelling young patients as “disturbed” is easier than dwelling on the problem of youth discomfort.
How much do you “know thyself”?
Words similar to those chosen by Nareem Jabbara delegate from the State of New York met by the boy at the Class of America, a seminar in which James will experience such psychological discomfort that he decides to run away:
Nareem Jabbar wrote to me to apologize for calling me a misfit, which she meant in the best sense, that I didn’t fit in because I had my own strong individuality.
Peter Cameron, One day this pain will be useful to you.
The protagonist of this novel can be seen as a misfitbut not in the sense of “problematic,” as society would like to classify him. James simply does not fit into what we might call “contagion desires”, determined by the ambitions, will and beliefs of those around him.
Even in the most banal contexts, how often are our most instinctual desires supplanted by an equally instinctual tendency to you comply to the will of others?
I would spend the rest of my life in transit, protected by the train, while this impossible, wretched world sped by outside the window.
Peter Cameron, One day this pain will be useful to you.
However, sometimes the issue is even more complex. It is not only a demanding society that often pushes us to seek the desires of others, to want without really wanting and to think in concrete and standardized terms about our identity. It is not always external reality that directs us in specific directions, but often we ourselves let ourselves get stuck in channels that could be suffocating.
The randomness of our being
The fact that James is aware of certain of his needs, does it perhaps imply that at the age of eighteen he has the truth in his grasp and that therefore the purpose of his existence has already been made visible to him in a clear and unmistakable light? Does James really know himself?
Sometimes it seems to hold certainties, other times a little less. And in the end it is too just like that: the admonition of “know thyself” is not as simple as we are often led to believe.
The conflict between the most pretentious society and the most authentic interiority is often not the only one responsible for determining psychological discomfort.
Another type of disagreement can often contribute: the deep gap between who we are e who we think we areWe cannot claim to possess an absolute knowledge of ourselves that would provide us with a detailed picture of who we are and who we might become, either at the age of eighteen or at the end of our lives.
Human identity is never granite. The totality of our choices is subordinated to randomness. None of us have such a firm and coherent nature that we want the same thing in every moment of our life, regardless of the social context, from the people who touch us and from those who pass through us, from the most disparate contingencies that can occur. All factors that therefore begin, transform, adapt and then end and perhaps, a matter of a little time, recur.
Even falling in love is not just amade of chemistry”, as is often said, but it is the product of one of the infinite inclinations of chance. Because yes, our personality is largely built on the situations we experience. Just think about the 40% of a person’s personality traits would in fact derive from inherited genes and the remaining percentage to factors environmental.
Nobody assures us that at any moment in our life, in any type of environmental situation, in any given psychological condition, we would have been lovers just that one specific person.
Suffer to know
James is troubled by theinfinite possibility of the choices offered by life. For Kierkegaard, “to exist means to be able to choose; indeed, to be possibility. But this does not constitute wealth, but rather the misery of man. His freedom of choice does not represent his greatness, but his permanent drama”.
An exemplary episode in this regard is the time when James, on the dating site Gent4Gent, creates a fake account and pretends to be someone else with John, his mother’s homosexual colleague who is looking for a soul mate. When John asks him to explain his evil deed, James can only answer: “I thought if I could invent a person you like, you would understand that I am that person.”
When asked by his parents whether he is homosexual, James will never care to provide an answer. The protagonist of this novel is a sort of anti-herowith many difficulties and many shortcomings that his family only exacerbates.
One day this pain will be useful to you it’s a Bildungsroman in which Peter Cameron weaves a intimate narrative and at times ironic, biting and sagacious, through incredibly sharp dialogues between the protagonist and his psychotherapist. Cameron opens the doors to the complex interiority of a character at odds with himself and with an external reality incapable of accepting, guiding and welcoming him.
At the end of the novel we do not know exactly which conclusions our protagonist has arrived. Will he go to college or not? Will he become aware of his sexuality? We don’t know. However, we can draw conclusions in this way: in some cases it is enough to know and accept yourself; in other cases, however, you just need to stop defining yourself at all costs. Don’t ask yourself too many whys and simply think that One day this pain will be useful to you.
Giulia De Filippis
(On the cover, photo by Nick Monica on Unsplash)
