With shocking quickness, another year has gone by in a blur and I am suddenly seventy-six. As Robert Frost wrote in one of his lucid, straight-speaking poems, the challenge increasingly is “what to make of a diminished thing.” Well, at least one can attempt an honest appraisal.
First of all, the senses have grown a little dulled. The beauty of this wild world does not seem so fresh. The shocks of beauty dealt by even the most ordinary things – cloud shadows passing over savannahs, the play of sunlight on a silver river, the smell of rain on sun-burned grass – these simple shocks of loveliness no longer strike with the singular and heart-stopping force of years ago.
The grand dreams of youth long ago faded. The ambition to beat the world and win Wimbledon which drove one to countless practice hours in the sun was never achieved – though it led, at least, to a lot of fun and friends and frolic on the way. The desire to be the greatest poet the world has ever seen has not, sad to say, been accomplished. Rather smaller ambitions like being Prime Minister of the whole West Indies were not, for some reason, fulfilled. Such is life. One has grown much wearier, snowy haired, much slower. The drive to be famous has for a long time seemed far less important than it did once upon a time – if only because the stars one aimed at so fervently were soon seen to be cold or fiery places where it was most uncomfortable to be. Ambition is a dusty business. One comes to know very well that in the end the bones of kings and beggars will jostle equally in the same unambitious earth.
Of course, much remains. The sense of the world’s great beauty has not been stilled. Not long ago up the Essequibo the rising sun built castles in the sky as magical as any I remember that used to tear my heart in pieces in my youth. And the simple beauties of the green and flower-filled, bird-bejewelled garden my wife has created is a constant, vivid joy.
A sense of humour, a sense of proportion in all things, seem to me more precious than they once did. After all, we are only little under the stars. We, and all our deadly serious concerns, are really not all that desperately important. I am surer now than I ever was that we should cultivate the habit of laughing at ourselves when we show the first signs of growing pompous or bad-tempered or over-critical of others.
As one grows older, two opposing inclinations contend. The first is to relax, withdraw completely from the hurly-burly, take a rest before the night of the long journey. The other inclination still remains a little stronger in me, I don’t know for how much longer. It is summed up in Sheila Wingfield’s good poem about the Chinese Emperor, Hsuang-Tsung:
Hsuang Tsung, great emperor,
Giddy, and ill and old, carried in a litter,
Saw the stars sway.
His conquests and his arguments,
And his powers, falling into fever with himself,
Pulsed their lives away.
Bow to his shade. To be at rest is but a dog
That sighs and settles: better
The unrelenting day.
Perhaps above all, I have been strengthened over the years in one particular certainty and one belief. This is very simply that the brotherhood of all men is not just a high-sounding cliché, but a real thing to cling to in the various turns and twists that human relationships take in life. Prejudice against any man because of class, creed, or colour really is despicable. Archibald MacLeish’s poem of the astronaut seeing the world whole and entire for the first time says it well:
To see the earth as it truly is,
small and blue and beautiful
in that eternal silence where it floats,
is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together
brothers on that bright loveliness in that eternal cold
brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.
Inevitably, I think of death more than I used to do. This may seem morbid – friends often reprove me for writing too much about death – but it is not really so. It does not get in the way of enjoying life every day. Indeed, it gives a sharper edge of meaning and beauty to every moment spent – like in good company tasting for the first time that delightful Hungarian plum liqueur at dinner recently. When there are fewer of anything – like moments of time – they become more valuable. This is not to say that I do not hate the thought of my death. It will be such a waste. I once read a poem by John Updike, the great American writer whose poem sequence Endpoint, which he wrote just before he died, is the first poetic masterpiece of the 21st century. That earlier poem captures a sense of what is lost when anyone dies.
Perfection Wasted
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and
market –
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to
tears,
their tears confused with their diamond
earrings.
their warm pooled breath in and out with
your heartbeat,
their response and your performance
twinned,
The jokes over the phone. The memories
packed
in the rapid access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.
Who will do it again? Not the same for sure. It is inexplicable why again and again and again so much interesting and valuable experience is allowed to accumulate and then what – relocated? I regret that is most unlikely.
