Chapter Forty Five

When you are a younger man you have so much time to make things right, and the wrongs don’t matter because for every wrong there is so much time in which to change bad to good, to change corruption to purity, to change immaturity to maturity, to change one thing into another.  You have oceans of time before you, and you are like a brave captain on the deck of your ship, looking over an infinity of waves at all the futures you might effect and all the pasts you might atone for.  When you are a younger man a year can seem like five, five years can seem like ten, and twenty years is not to be considered.  Time looms large over everything that you do, but the looming done is done without malice, and looming time lumbers alongside you as a friend, a companion from which you have many joys to take and many things to learn.  When you are a younger man, the road forks in so many benevolent directions, and you are free to choose from a multitude of adventures.  Rarely are you called upon to pay the full price of any endeavor.  Such an exaction awaits much later days, when you are too old to remember what it is exactly that you are paying for.  And anyway you are a younger man, so why should you care?  Why not gamble a bit with circumstance?  Why not join in the play?  When you are a younger man, you know that you will survive forever, because it might as well be forever that stands before you.

        When you are an older man you begin to realize that time was fleeting and the hours short after all.  Death casts a spectral light behind you, and in the length of your own shadow you can measure the instants between infancy and childhood, between childhood and adolescence, between adolescence and adulthood, between the onset of maturity and the lapse into disrepair.  You begin to see the absolutes in what has come before; you begin to see the certainties.  You begin to see friends and relations die, and you reflect on the fact that for you such a fate will also come to pass.  Time begins to move faster, and though you might wish to arrest its progress you are powerless to stop the onward rush into the future, into the endless change that spawned us all.  When you are an older man, you try to take it easier, because you know that some injuries are lasting, and moreover that some injuries are not easily born through the remainders of our days.  You try to act with kindness if you have the presence of mind to do so, because you realize how lasting an impact your actions can have, and how brief a space of time you have to make those impacts.  When you are an older man your day is ever short, and the fragile nature of present things is forever before your eyes.  When you look upon the world you see newness everywhere, and if you are a wise man you try to appreciate this newness and not to resent it.  And when you see an oldness in the world you try to appreciate that too, for it is in all cases a remnant of what you are becoming, every single day.

        When you are a younger or an older man you are in most cases ignorant of your predicament, and it may be better to accept this ignorance with an ounce of humility.  When you are a younger or an older man you are always going to die, and it is always going to be sooner than you think.  When you are a younger or an older man it is better to try to love someone, for other people are what we’re made for.  When you are a younger or an older man it is better not to hold grudges, because grudges are like lies you tell yourself, lies about your superiority over other people.  When you are a younger or an older man you are occasionally betrayed, often misunderstood, and continually in the dark.  But you try, don’t you?  You try.

        When you are not a man you are a woman, and in that case you are younger or older, beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, loved or unloved, loving or unloving, pure of heart, or impure of thought.  When you are a woman you are often everything to a man, whether he is younger or older, whether he is wise or unwise, whether he is worthy of you or not.  Unless of course he is a man for other men, and in that case you are playing the same game, by the same set of rules.  In that case you are comrades, unless one of you does not really know the other.

        If you are not a woman and not a man you are everywhere, and I am nowhere, and this story is soon at an end.  No true androgynies exist outside of timelessness, and the passing of the salamander through the flames.  Some forms of grief take a heavy toll, and I cannot bear to look at them.  I would rather think upon younger and older men and their younger and older women.  I would rather think upon these things that are alive to me, and not upon those things that are soon dead.

        If there is a book to end this story please take it from me.  I would that it was another younger older man woman to open it.  His trial is soon upon him.  I do not want to flicker.  I do not want to fade.