Numerology

I turned 61 today - or yesterday. I live in the Far East, but my thoughts are somewhere in North America. A friend wished me a happy birthday and then said "come home". I will, I will. But first there's this rough patch to get through, this unnecessary detour. It's unavoidable, can't be helped. But for now, time to reflect on my progress.

Poets always put a patina on it, getting old, I mean. Like découpage. Two poets I have long admired talked about the common perceptions of age, without really feeling them in themselves. Thomas Hardy saw how his spirit, still willing, had to contend with his flesh, which had altered:

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’

For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

Hardy felt betrayed, by the changes in others and the changes in his physical appearance. But the incongruity of his still youthful passion against the image in his mirror was too much for him, too absurd to accept. Only one can be true, but which one?


Philip Larkin, who was a great admirer of Hardy, felt deeply the difference between his life and the lives of others; a disconnect between what was expected of his life and what his life had amounted to. Not by regret, but by the refusal of others, people he once knew, to imagine their own lives otherwise.

‘Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do
You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?
I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In ’43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

Ah, but Larkin was afraid of dying - not so much death as the moment when he would die. He anticipated it, just as Shakespeare had in Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

And Shakespeare died at 52! "Death is but the shifting wind that fills the living sail." I wrote these words when I was 20. How did I know it at 20? "The idea is to die young as late as possible," wrote the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. And Oscar Wilde's lovely line, "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." And poor Oscar was dead at 46!

I feel myself to be exactly the same at 61 as I was at 20 - as I was at 10! One's age is unimportant.