An epigraph (literally, a “writing upon”) is a brief inscription at the beginning of a literary work, meant to suggest the book’s theme or convey its tone. Surprisingly, an epigram is almost a literary genre in itself, a fact you can verify quickly by googling “famous epigraphs.” My own favorite is E. M. Foster’s epigraph to Howard’s End, “only connect….” Its wistful poignance emerges only when you’ve read the book and realize that connecting is the key thing the characters can’t do.
But I found an epigraph almost as good as Forster’s in Colette Shade’s recent memoir Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (essays on the future that never was). The epigraph is:
“Maybe someday you will rejoice to recall even this.”— Virgil, Aeneid.
Yes, I am a devoted Virgilian, so any reference to the Roman poet wins my applause. But this quotation, introducing a contemporary coming-of-age story (the author was born in 1988, making her a Millennial), struck me as a most unusual and provoking choice. In the original Latin the quotation is “forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.” It’s the final line of an eloquent speech of encouragement Aeneas gives his exhausted crew after they land on Libya’s shores, shipwrecked after a prolonged storm at sea stilled only by Neptune’s intervention.
But Colette Shade’s own account in Y2K features no shipwrecks, no noble heroes, no capricious deities. It’s a series of reflections on the unfolding of the author’s young life from the giddy exuberance of the 1990s through a chain of disasters—the warning burst of the dot-com bubble in March 2000, through 9-11’s thunderous crash, and culminating in the 2008 sub-prime mortgage collapse of 2008. Although they were not (as in Virgil) weary, exhausted mariners washing up on foreign shores, young people of Colette’s generation could well feel cast adrift after beginning life filled with the brightest hopes. The Cold War had ended, the dot-com boom was filling middle-class pockets, and the Internet was bringing the whole wide world into their round, candy-colored iMacs. “We dreamt we were ascending into the future, leaving history and all its complications behind on the ground.” No wonder the fall was hard. And no wonder when they started to wake up from that hard landing, they saw they were living in a dark, dangerous, ambiguous world. What to do? How to go forward?
Aeneas himself faced a similar predicament after Troy’s sacking by the Greeks. But he had one advantage Colette Shade and her generation did not have: a prophecy, in this case the one revealed to Aeneas by the ghost of his wife Creusa: that he would live to found an imperial dynasty on the Italian peninsula.
Lacking such assurance, Shade—speaking for a generation similarly bereft—has to forge her own path forward. And this she does, bravely, in two steps: first, by making peace with the infatuations of her youth, and second, by using that self-understanding to point to a new path for her future.
I call this process a brave one because the infatuations were and remain seductive. To have spent your young life in perpetual longing for the glitz and glitter of a lost wonderland numbs the soul—a condition the author calls “millennial nostalgia.” Yet only by savoring that intoxication in small doses once again can you move on from it. Brilliantly, the author writes in such a way that we feel both the intoxication’s attraction and its emptiness, a doubleness of mind that can clear a path for growth.
Here’s one example of many in Y2K where Shade accomplishes the feat of critiquing “millennial nostalgia,” beginning by reenacting the frenzied eagerness that prompted it. She stacks up like houses of cards the accumulations of places, people, products, and promotions that once entranced her, and then undercuts them, so that they flutter to the floor, wilted and weightless.
The whole time I was there. Not in the boutiques or nightclubs, not in the beach resorts or on the red carpets, but in my bedroom and my rec room, at school, in strip mall nail salons, on the treadmill at the Y.… I wasn’t doing my homework but I was learning plenty: about every shopping spree, fashion don’t, shocking weight-gain, shocking weight-loss, rehab stint, baby bump, post-baby body, diet, divorce, workout routine, feud, fairy-tale wedding, and mega-home purchase. Everyone knew that the best part of “Us” [the online celeb magazine] was “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” The section showed paparazzi candids of celebrities going about their daily lives, similar to the ones for which the press hounded Princess Diana before her death.
Colette Shade’s craft is so deft it takes effort to slow it down to inspect it. But here’s a try: note how alliterations speed up the tempo in the sequence of “b’s” starting with “boutiques,” or the momentary stumbling over “s’s” and vowels in “strip mall sale salons,” followed by the smooth recovering rhythm of “on the treadmill at the Y.” Then note also the careful ordering of touted items. We start comparatively humbly in “boutiques” and end grandly “on the red carpets.” More spectacularly ascendant still is the relentless rise from “shopping spree” through body work to baby to divorce to more body work to a presumed but elided second or third or maybe even fourth marriage to more feuding to the “fairy-tale wedding” which isn’t really the final word, the true culmination. That would be the “mega-home purchase”! And that’s still not the best part!! We haven’t even gotten to the celeb candids!!!
But just at the peak of the hubbub a different Colette Shade briefly takes over: not the bedazzled teenager coming of age in a seemingly endless swarming of glamor available to her at the touch of a computer button, but the older and wiser Colette recalling something she’d known even back in her giddy daze but had suppressed: Princess Diana’s death in a car crash caused by the very same voyeurism that had turned Diana into the first celeb idol and Colette into a worshipper.
No longer.
At the end of the book, the older, wiser Colette now emerges fully. Struggling to find a job in the post-2008 economy forces hard truths on her—about history and about herself. As she writes in the book’s last section, “Closing Time,”
…in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it seemed I had completely misunderstood the world, and I wanted to know what really happened. Most of all, I wanted to know how I fit into that story.
So she puts herself through a course of rigorous historical study and self-searching, and emerges with a progressive critique both of a country and of a personal past fixated on acquisition. In her case, acquisition of possessions; in America’s, of land. Fortified by this new understanding, she yearns to go forward, build a politics that rights the wrongs of the America she’s grown up in. Build a new self that embodies those progressive values. But the pull of the past remains powerful:
The internet promised both wealth and societal progress. Millennials are aging now, too, but in a far more violent, precarious, and uncertain world [than Boomers did]. And so we look to the past for our hope, because hope in the future feels so hard to come by.
Pulled in two directions, into the past and into the future, she looks in both directions, summing up her situation this way: “I vacillate between both.”
It’s an uncomfortable tension, to say the least. But we all feel it.
Perhaps Virgil can comfort us as he has comforted Shade:
“Maybe someday you will rejoice to recall even this.”
After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.
