I am 43 years old today. As I age, the years seem to pass more rapidly. I also seem to think of myself as getting older. When I was in my twenties, every birthday was unfolding adulthood. Today, I am surely past my physical prime, and probably not quite so sharp as I was once.
A few poems for the day. First, I’ve had on my mind the end of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Prufrock wanders self-absorbed in the sense of his own mediocrity. This is not a healthy attitude, of course, but not uncommon either.
Next, time’s passing has made me think of Yeats and “The Wild Swans at Coole”:
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
I think my trod is indeed heavier than it was, not from sadness or burden but just from accumulated life. My heart is not yet old, but I can see the end to this time of luxury. Soon enough, I will have real worries about my physical health. I’ll lose friends and family. Places I have known will change forever.
Finally, I try to take resilience from a favorite, Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:
Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
I will strive, in the way of Spinal Tap’s Viv Savage, to have a good time all the time. And no, this is not a declaration of hedonism.
