Thoughts on Being not so Young as I Once Was
These days when I pick up the pen my thoughts turn to the past, almost invariably, of their own accord, as a plant turns to the sun, except that here it is more memory of a sun, and at that a sun that burns more brightly in memory than it ever did on a young man’s hopes and dreams so wild he scarcely acknowledged them even to himself. Perhaps it is not so much or least not wholly a turning to the past as it is a turning away from what lies ahead, which does not figure to be any great shakes.
Only lately is the depth of ambition become clear and parallel with it conviction that the ambition is not altogether out of the question, risible, ridiculous, a recognition that bears with it a shadow suspicion that it is too late for whatever shot I may once have had. Yet I am not willing to put ambition aside. It would be nice to think there is something heroic in this, to feel it more than vanity, foolish pride, stubbornness, and want of a better option. That something would be nice does not make it so.
For the better part of a decade the twin themes of hope and possibility animated the best of the poems that came to me at my desk and in coffee shops and on treks about the city, on the train to Seattle and a plane to Toronto, while reading Keats and discovering Emily Brontë, over dinner and wine and good conversation with a friend, at poetry readings and museums and bookstores, in the cinema waiting for the lights to go down and the film to come up, contemplating the sky, the drift of cloud through a distant blue early in the evening just before it all goes dark.
Those themes are no longer part of me. The onslaught of passing time has something to do with it. While I may not yet be old, I am certainly no longer young. More good years lie behind than ahead even under the rosiest of scenarios. A friend remarked recently that his mind is not as nimble as it once was. Neither is mine. How much, though, should be made of this? Lost nimbleness is balanced at least to a degree by a lifetime of experience, in which I include reading and the intellectual life generally along with so-called real life, which brings with it perspective, context, and greater resources on which we draw, whose absence left our younger, more nimble minds to operate under limits of their own.
My friend’s remark about lost nimbleness came in the context of his study of algebraic geometry, which he tells me is a really hot field in mathematics these days. I gather that he is frustrated by his inability to grasp more than the basics thus far. He has a master’s degree in math and keeps up with these things, but his circumstances now, in his early 60s and not a professional mathematician, are far different from when he was a young fellow studying the subject, exposed to its rigors daily in class, his thinking prodded by teachers and classmates, immersed in it then in a way he is not likely to be now.
The loss of mental nimbleness that comes with age is only part of the story. Our faculties may be diminished; they are not in ruins. The friend of whom I speak retains a critical intellect and remarkable curiosity. He reads voraciously on such a mind-boggling range of subjects that I can only feel admiration and a touch of envy. For my part, in November 2010 at the age of 58, I ran my first marathon. The capacity to be touched, sometimes brought to tears, by lines of poetry, a passage in a novel, a scene in a film, a piece of music, a flash of light on water or an expression of caring, is yet with me. My ambition as a poet remains vigorous, even as I am frustrated by my meager accomplishment. How diminished am I?
I do my best to reject all false hope. Integrity and intellectual honesty lie at the heart of whatever creed I hold. I have faith that my pen has not run dry. I could be wrong. We can always be wrong, but to acknowledge our errors and wrecks, our limits and failings, is not tantamount to giving in to them. I could wake tomorrow to find my physical health or mental faculties devastated by disease. For now fortune smiles. There remains an openness into which I may step and make of it the best that I can.
David :: Mar.12.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »