Men At Forty
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.
And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His fatherโs tie there in secret
And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
โDonald Justice
IV
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
โWilliam Butler Yeats
Whole poem here (Vacillation).
An Old Man
In the inner room of the noisy cafรฉ
an old man sits bent over a table;
a newspaper before him, no companion beside him.
And in the scorn of his miserable old age,
he meditates how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, the art of the word, and good looks.
He knows he has aged much; he is aware of it, he sees it,
and yet the time when he was young seems like
yesterday. How short a time, how short a time.
And he ponders how Wisdom had deceived him;
and how he always trusted herโwhat folly!โ
the liar who would say, โTomorrow. You have ample time.โ
He recalls impulses he curbed; and how much
joy he sacrificed. Every lost chance
now mocks his senseless prudence.
โฆBut with so much thinking and remembering
the old man reels. And he dozes off
bent over the table of the cafรฉ.
C.P. Cavafy (translation from the Greek found here).
The Old Fools
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
Itโs more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and canโt remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy thereโs really been no change,
And theyโve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching the light move? If they donโt (and they canโt), itโs strange;
Why arenโt they screaming?
At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. Itโs only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you canโt pretend
Thereโll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that theyโre for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines โ
How can they ignore it?
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting
People you know, yet canโt quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sunโs
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give
An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinctionโs alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.
โPhilip Larkin
Itโs barely twelve pages long, dear reader.
What are you doing with your time and imagination?
Youโre fine, Mr. Corte. In fact, youโre looking a little better than yesterdayโฆ:
โGiuseppe Corte didnโt need anything, but he began to chat freely with the young woman, asking for information about the clinic. In this way, he learned about the hospitalโs unique practice of assigning its patients to different floors in accordance with the gravity of their illness. On the seventh floor, the top floor, only the very mildest cases were treated. Those whose forms of the illness werenโt grave, but who certainly couldnโt be neglected, were assigned to the sixth floor. More serious infections were treated on the fifth floor, and so on and so forth. Gravely ill patients were housed on the second floor; and on the first floor, those for whom all hope had been abandoned.โ
You probably spent a lot of energy when younger, wishing to be older, and as you get older, find yourself spending time wishing you were younger.
