When I was young I was ready and eager to follow the advice given by Terence, the Roman poet, a long, long time ago: “I am a man,” he wrote, “and therefore anything that any man does should interest me.” Then life stretched infinitely before me and it seemed there would be time for everything: time to visit every land and sail every sea, time to try every sport, time to read every book, time to love all the girls, to investigate all the mysteries, time indeed to check out the entire universe.
But gradually it becomes very clear that the time available is not infinite and one has to begin to pick and choose. For a start ambitions contract. It would have been nice to have won Wimbledon or hit a century at Lords, but one has had to put that aside until some future incarnation. A long time ago – when I discovered the attractions of living impurely – I had to give up all thought of being Pope or even a scarlet-capped Cardinal. Long ago when the West Indies Federation collapsed, I gave up all political ambition.
Gradually the available options for glory reduce and one makes do with the small triumphs and copes with the run-of-the-mill disasters of everyday living. It is now too late to become a distinguished brain surgeon or launch a great career in the law or academia or seek to be a high and mighty chief over anything or anybody. The frantic itch of ambition subsides into the gentlest of tickles on the skin. The summons to great deeds becomes a whisper in the ear. Climbing to the top of anything appears more and more in its true light: mere vanity of vanities. The first woman to climb the great Mount Anapurna in the Himalayas, in reply to the praise she received when she returned, said the final word on the subject of all fame and ambition:
“You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments, then the wind blows your footprints away.”
There are a good many things about getting older that I dislike intensely. The steady loss of spring in the legs and sharp reflexes, while the brain still knows very well what to do, slows one down infuriatingly. Even the best wine and most delicious food becomes less enjoyable as one learns more and more to beware the potential back-lash. The increasing number of funerals that one must sadly attend is depressing.
However, one good thing about growing older is that there is a much greater perception about what will and what will not be rewarding to attempt. A lifetime is too short anyway, and now is becoming shorter and shorter, so that the need to get one’s priorities right becomes more and more imperative. I am quite clear now that I am never going to be able to read Dostoevsky in the original Russian or understand the works of Schopenhauer. I am not going to learn to cook. I am not going to visit Mongolia. I am not after all ever going to own a Rolls Royce. This narrowing of the way ahead is a welcome development. It cuts out all the frustration of much too diversified desire which attended our recklessly demanding youth. And it concentrates one’s mind much more satisfyingly on what still remains fruitfully possible to do and dream about and reach towards without ridiculously falling short.
And one unexpected glory now graces my life. Grandchildren! Through them, each day shines with the new things they discover almost every hour. In the madding rush and crowded life one lives when in one’s thirties and forties and fifties there is little time, and probably less inclination, to spare time for children. A child, though much loved, will tend to seem incidental, if not an actual nuisance, to most men in the high tide of their lives.
But now, with a leap of the heart, one suddenly has the chance to take complete delight in such gifts. For them nothing, nothing, has faded yet into the light of common day as so much fades for us as age takes hold. Every morning they awaken to inexplicable miracles. With them around old age seems far away. Their eyes hold visions that I can share again. I pick up Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” and feel more than ever before the overwhelming meaning of that great ode.
“There was a time when meadow, grove and stream
The earth and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”
But the children can and do. And though, of course, it is true that nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower, yet in these children, as in all children, life in all its freshness and high hope goes on and I am part of it.
