Undergrowth Revisited

I blogged about the British writer Alan Hollinghurst early on in The Mantelpiece's existence, but a passage from his novel The Folding Star that I didn't quote actually might be my favorite. I remember reading it on the morning bus one day last fall and then e-mailing it to a gay male friend as soon as I got into the office. I think I may have hesitated to quote from it here for fear of offending straight readers, but it's been on my mind lately.

In this scene, the single gay narrator is visiting an old school friend, a married man with three small kids:

We were both men of the world, of different but adjacent worlds; and we were about the same age now, though Willie seemed to me to have entered the placid, incurious middle phase, the semi-sedation of hetero expectations, whilst I was still running loose, swerving and tripping through the romantic undergrowth outside. He must be thirty-five, I was thirty-three, would be thirty-four in the week after Christmas; but as always I felt that my age was only a term of convenience, an average age, and that one moment I was donnish and past it and the next a bewildered youngster scarcely out of school.

I may have also hesitated to reveal how much this passage still spoke to me, well past the ages of those two characters. I suppose I feel a little more comfortable admitting my affinity today, when there's no romantic turmoil going on in my life (no romantic anything, as it happens). It really captures a true feeling -- even now -- especially that last sentence.