There is an entry in my father’s diary which moved me deeply when I read it after he died. The entry was made in his eighty-fourth year and on this day he recorded his sense of being two different selves. One he can easily define – it is his body grown old and now much broken down, limbs weak and steps hesitant, thinned hair and muffled hearing and dimming eyes, the pains of illness taking an increasing toll, night agues and fears more frequent now, all litheness gone and sleekness of the skin, the fragility of bones getting closer and closer to escaping the bonds of flesh, a general decrepitude which dishonours what the human body in its perfection can be.
The other self my father feels just as vividly and even more deeply, but it is not so easy to describe. All he can say is that it is the same self he has always been. It is himself every moment he has ever been. It is himself when he was a little boy running in front of his mother on the grass to try and catch a bird that landed for a moment on the grass in front of them. It is himself as a young man with friends sailing in a dinghy in golden sun with wind in his hair and all life good and stretching into the future forever. It is himself in the plenitude of career achievement and athletic vigour. It is himself breathless before the wonders of new worlds discovered. It is himself with his beloved every step of the way, their 63 years long, changeless in their love and the blessings of their children. That self has always been the same and now he can write in his diary and say it is still not intimidated by the other self which changes and grows old and decrepit and will soon die.
It is true what my father wrote. There is not one of us that does not feel the two selves that we are – the changing body, the unchanging core of self. I am in my 92nd year of whatever strange journey this is and I feel the truth of the two selves strongly. The aging body so much fuller now of fragility and deterioration, mocks the past resilience and spring that I knew. But what does not change is powerful in me and feels life as gleamingly beautiful and sweet to experience as it ever was.
Perhaps it is in sport that my sense of the two selves is strongest. There has been so much good sport recently – World Cup Cricket, European Cup and Copa America football tournaments, Wimbledon at its glorious best – and soon there will be the Olympics in Paris. With delight I see the current young champions in their agility and quicksilver flair and their strength and endurance and sometimes their astonishing, perfect beauty and there is part of me which remembers the life in sport I had and feels the excitement and the fire and the mastery as if they had not gone at all but happened only a moment past and the wearing-out, awkward-old body is then quite forgotten and the changeless self performing wonders is all that really matters.
