Like certain gnarled, dried-out old trees long given up for
dead, some writers and artists, not many to be sure, unexpectedly bloom again in
their old age. On starting 'Paradise Lost', Milton feared he was too elderly to
embark on the monumental task he'd set himself. Yeats wrote brilliant romantic
verse in his youth, but his best poems were written by the snowy-haired senator
he was destined to become. 'That is no country for old men' is the first line of
his Sailing to Byzantium (1927), as Cormac McCarthy (and Javier Bardem) can
testify.
But he goes on to say: " An aged man is but a paltry thing unless soul clap its hands and sing". And that's what it's all about, wanting to rejoice and be gathered into "the artifice of eternity". Even so, so much has changed in the past eighty years, maybe these lines are no longer valid ... or comprehensible.
Disguised with wigs, monocles and canes, in the fin de siecle Vienna of Stefan Sweig, young professionals bent over backwards to make themselves look as decrepit - and therefore venerable - as possible. Our own fin de siecle was the complete opposite. How long will it be before an ordinance bans old people from appearing in the public? But first it must be determined what makes us consider a person old. Is a fifty-year-old who has accepted early retirement old? Is an athletic, seventy-year-old golf player old? Is Berlusconi old? What a muddle.
There was an aged newspaperman covering an incident in the port of Barcelona the other day. He was badly dressed, chain smoked and smelt of stale booze. Nobody wanted to let him jot down a word in that ridiculous pad he held in his hand; they were queuing to be interviewed by a TV crew. A heavily tattooed girl hurled an insult at him containing the word 'blog'. But the last laugh is on our veteran reporter: the TV staff was just baloney, a hoax. There wasn't even any film in the camera, though the recording afforded excellent copy.
No country for old men, hah?
Tag:OldMen,GnarledTree,Baloney,Hoax
