"I'm just being realistic"

There's a way of holding the golden version that presents itself as toughness. You're not sentimental. You're realistic. Things were better and they've got worse and you're the one prepared to say so.

Look at what realism would require. It would require the whole record. A realistic account of nineteen ninety-six has the rent in it and the bad back and the friend who'd gone quiet and the general election you were furious about and the job you hated. A realistic account of today has the dentist and the work thing and also whatever was good this week, which there was, whether or not it's registered. Realism is putting both years on the table with everything in them and looking. The golden version does the opposite. It takes one year's problems out and leaves the other's in, and calls the result a clear-eyed view.

The realistic person, in other words, is the one who does the chapter 1 exercise and keeps doing it. Who, when the sigh arrives, asks what was wrong that summer, and answers honestly. Who reads the old diary and winces. Who, when the pub agrees that things have got worse, says "have they, though" and means it as a question. That's harder than the golden version, and it's the tough-minded position, and it doesn't feel like it because the golden version has taken the word realism for itself.

There's a reason it has. The decline story has a serious air. Saying things have got worse sounds like the view of someone who's seen a lot and isn't fooled, and saying things are about the same sounds naive. Mastroianni and Gilbert's seventy years of people saying the same thing suggest it's the other way about. The people who said things had got worse in nineteen sixty were wrong by the measurements, and the ones who said it in nineteen eighty-five were wrong by the measurements, and there's no obvious reason to think the current batch have got lucky.

I'm not asking you to become cheerful about the present. I'm asking you to be realistic about the past, which is where the realism has been missing. The whole record is the realistic one. It has the good in it, all of it, and it also has the rent, and a person holding both is seeing more than a person holding either.