‘I learned to let go of the vanities of youth’

I’ve been writing lately, here and there, in snatches of prose, about life in the final quarter, about how surprisingly agile old age seems so far to be (it’s almost like old age is another compressed lifetime with its own period of vigour, its own middle age and its own decline).  Of course I mention the little aches, and twinges in some old scars, but I haven’t mentioned another effect, one that for me comes I think in good time, and for others may come too late: the ability to be still and listen, to be open, even exposed, and the ability still to say what it is I see and hear.

I laugh more than I did when I was young, and I weep more too, for sorrow, for pleasure equally. Some days I’m as restless as a young man setting out on adult life, his heart holding fast to promises too fearful to redeem, steeled against a world too hostile to trust, that delivers too many jabs to the psychic solar plexus, from too many grinning bully boys, and too many others looking sideways for the advantage or cringing from remembered blows of their own. The world then had to be barged through with bluff and manly bravado, or crept through with cunning stealth like a U-boat at periscope depth slipping at silent speed through narrow enemy straits. Go deep, go deep the heart urges.

Now at 70 I find myself able to be myself, that self that hid for all those years; but these words are not meant to be about that timid boy cowering inside himself. They are not written to offer the old excuses, or beg the old indulgences. These words are suggested, or boldly etched on the inner walls of my mind by the light coming in through a hundred cracks that are now opening. The ballasts are blown, the conning tower is out of the water, the wind is fresh and the ocean calm and bright. The war it seems is over and my history is about to begin.

There is a crack in everything, sang Leonard Cohen, that’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen is one of the things I found while letting go of the vanities of youth. A strange old man, a soul-whisperer who fused real poetry with music, who smiled and told us, only when we realise it doesn’t matter, will we see how it does. I laughed at him once, as an agent of despair. Now I see he was achingly funny, so very literate, and in his self-deprecating, intellectual way, a blues man with a voice unlike any other, and a streak of genius running through his soul and shining in his polished words. I see, too, that his art, far from invoking despair, actually lifts us clear of the wreckage, brings us to the surface, and makes us light as air.

I want to track a few lives along a few different paths, to show where they changed course. Why? Not to explain why the human race is as it is, or does what it does, because that is beyond my skills, but to open up a few of those cracks that Leonard sang about, and as Suzanne did, to hold the mirror. On this new adventure, I am as uncertain as I was when I left my parent’s home at 17. I don’t know where this will take me, or if it will be a dead end. Yet, I am confident that if I sit long enough and make myself still enough, that the story will be told. I’m no Jack Kerouac; I won’t be spilling out 180,000 words in a fevered torrent, but I have reason to suspect that this writing enterprise is a kind of mining. You have to dig a lot holes, make then straight and workmanlike, and when you hit the vein follow it to the end.

What has surprised you about getting older? Can you relate to this author?

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