Yesterday, I finished Journey by Moonlight. I loved it. Reading it, I recognized that it's part of a sub-genre I don't think I've ever identified before, but that I particularly enjoy. I would describe it as bourgeois alienation and exceptionalism. These are books about people who feel out of place in their fundamentally bourgeois lives and who act on a desire to escape, only to reflect on their own basic bourgeois-ness. A couple other books I've loved that fit this mold are The Garden Next Door and The Dream of My Return. In Journey by Moonlight, there are two parallel cases of this: the main character Mihály - whose central conflict is between his sense of exceptionalism and his desire to conform - and his wife Erzsi, who is attracted to Mihály because he is different, even as his decision to marry her was part of his attempt to conform and live a normal bourgeois life. As she observes late in the book, "Mihály returns my love at the moment simply because he is looking to me for bourgeois order and security, and everything I actually ran to him to escape from." Meanwhile, Mihály diagnoses his ailment as "acute nostalgia."
I think these stories appeal to me because I identify with them. The simultaneous belief in my own exceptionalism and fear that I was just normal was a tension I felt particularly strongly as a teenager -- and was probably the driving force behind a lot of my more regrettable and risky actions at the time. But as I've aged into a decidedly non-exceptional, fundamentally bourgeois adulthood, I still often have the sense that this isn't the real me. Or rather, that there is a self I largely suppress in my day-to-day life, especially my professional life.
I have a lot more to say on this topic, but I think I will save it for another post. In the meantime, here is quote from Journey by Moonlight that I particularly loved: "... in the spiritual life, opposites meet. It's not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing."
