Another birthday has come and gone. I hear old Sam Beckett’s pessimistic shout: “We breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideas!” Surely it is not a year since the last one. Doris Lessing in her autobiography Under My Skin describes how perception of time passing changes utterly as one gets older. She describes her experience as a child:
“How far away it was, the condition of being grown up and free, for I was still in the state when the end of the day could hardly be glimpsed from its start…. There is no way of conveying in words the difference between child-time and grown-up time…. in the story of a life, if it is being told true to time as outwardly experienced, then I’d say 70% of the book would take you to age 10. At 80% you would have reached 15. At 95% you get to about 30. The rest is a rush towards eternity.”
That is perfectly true. As one gets older life becomes an ever-increasing blur of days, weeks, months, years. If one keeps a journal and looks back on it the days are packed enough with incidents and people and events, joys and fears and a hundred small triumphs and tribulations – as the days have always been. But it is the living through it all that gets quicker and quicker. Someone has pushed the fast-forward button.
There is little time left for great achievements. Nobody gets a return match between himself and his destiny. The main tasks of life are already undertaken or nearly finished. The hectic concerns that ate up the hours are not half so insistent and seem not one tenth so important. What is called getting on in the world has long begun to seem a fool’s pastime.
The quiet pleasures, the private delights, the sitting in the garden talking with my wife or reading as evening falls, matter much more now. Going out in society, to parties and receptions, to any gathering except a meeting between close friends, becomes increasingly a burdensome chore to be avoided at all costs.
Increasingly, memories come out of the blue from scores of years in the past. For some reason at this time I remember when I was very young I went to a house where there was a blind boy in the family. I remember a dark room full of flowers. The boy played with his mother’s face with the fingers of both hands and he was smiling. Why does that particular picture come back so vividly now after more than 70 years?
More and more I see the truth of the 17th Century Japanese poet Tachibana Akemi’s “Poem of Solitary Delights” which I first read in my twenties and which in those days puzzled me:
“What a delight it is
When, borrowing
Rare writings from a friend,
I open out
The first sheet.
What a delight it is
When a guest you cannot stand
Arrives, then says to you
“I’m afraid I can’t stay long”
And soon goes home.
What a delight it is
When, reading of wild exploits,
I hear about me daily
The well-loved sounds
Of a settled home.
What a delight it is
When night falls
A graceful woman
Brings fragrant candles
And chilled glasses of wine.
What a delight it is
When after a hundred days
Of racking my brains
That verse that wouldn’t come
Suddenly turns out well.”
I have noticed a surprising development. As the years go by the beauty of ordinary things again becomes more sharply focused. When I was very young every day revealed fresh miracles of a shining world. Then there was a long period in the press of strenuous ambition and coping with the clutter of life when one lived without revelations. But now they begin to come again. I think even Samuel Beckett, the eternal fatalist, felt it in his aging bones: “What sky! What light! Ah, in spite of all, it is a blessed thing to be alive in such weather, and out of hospital.” This heightened perception I think must come in childhood and with age: in childhood because it is happening for the first time, in age because you may soon have to say goodbye. As the birthdays inexorably quicken their pace one can only be thankful for this unexpected blessing.
